The New York Times company posted a nearly $24 million profit for the second quarter of 2018, powered largely on the strength of continued digital subscribers, the company announced Wednesday.
The quarter saw the addition of 109,000 digital-only subscribers, boosting the total to 2.9 million.
Despite beating earning projections by analysts, the company saw its shares drop nearly 5 percent in early trading, to $23.15.
“Subscription revenues accounted for nearly two-thirds of the Company’s revenues, a trend we expect to continue. We continue to believe that there is significant runway to expand that base substantially,” said Times President and CEO Mark Thompson in a statement.
“At the end of Q2, we had 3.8 million total subscriptions, 2.9 million of which were digital-only. Our subscribers who came to us around the 2016 election and post-Election periods continue to retain better than previous cohorts.”
The company reported that its digital revenue had grown roughly 20 percent from the second quarter of 2017, to $99 million.
On the down side, the Times’ legacy business continued its steady decline with both digital advertising revenue declining by 7.5 percent and print advertising revenue falling by 11.5 percent.
“Turning to advertising, this was a subdued quarter for digital advertising as we predicted, but we remain confident that we will return to strong year-over-year growth in the third quarter,” Thompson said.