Move with The Times
Despite being 171-years-old, The New York Times isn’t doing a bad job of keeping up with the demands of modern news consumption, as the newspaper revealed this week that it had added another 180,000 digital-only subscribers last quarter.
**All the news that’s fit to digitize...**
The Gray Lady’s online arm has been progressing steadily for a while, amid a wider move towards subscription revenue and away from advertising, but the pandemic really kicked things into gear. 2020, for example, was the first year in history that the Times’s digital subscription revenue outweighed their print figures, a trend that has been compounded in each passing quarter since.
In terms of subscription revenue, the Times’s print products brought in ~$10m less last year than they did in 2020. Their digital subscription revenues, on the other hand, rose by $176m, widening the gap between the online and print mediums further. Ad revenue (not on the chart) has also fallen in the last decade.
**...and more besides**
With its acquisition of Wordle at the start of 2022, as well as popular sports website The Athletic, the Times has cemented what you might call a “land-and-expand” strategy, bolstering its online entertainment offerings to broaden the appeal beyond core news. That little blue bar at the top of the chart will be a lot bigger in 5 or 10 years, if all goes to plan.
