All the news that's fit to... punt? The New York Times is looking into buying The Athletic, according to Axios.
- The Athletic: The subscription-based sports news site is valued at ~$500M, and reportedly has 1.2M subscribers — but it's still not profitable.
- NYT has a $7B market cap and 8M paying subscribers. It's profitable, and the stock has nearly 4X'd in the past five years. That's likely because...
Skipped the paper... The New York Times is no longer a newspaper — it's a multi-multi-media company. As Google and Facebook ate up newspapers' ad revenue, NYT pivoted. It took its core stories and turned them into documentaries, TV shows, and podcasts like The Daily. It acquired an app that turns articles into audio. And it leaned into digital subscriptions, which brought in more revenue than print for the first time last year.
- Subscribe or die: NYT sells subscriptions for its news, games, cooking, and audio products. ~7M of its 8M paying subscribers have digital subs.
- The Athletic and its 1M+ subscribers could be a boon to NYT's subscription offering — especially if it ever decides to bundle them.
Cast a wide net, catch a wide audience... continue to grow. NYT is a 170-year-old company that you would've only turned to for news 20 years ago. Now, nearly half of NYT's new digital subscribers came from non-core news products last quarter. Think: subs for cooking fans, gamers, and audio buffs (aka: pod-heads). The Athletic could broaden NYT's net even further to catch dedicated sports fans. While its core news audience may be saturated, these extracurriculars have room to grow.