The New York Times broke 12 million subscribers for the first time in the year’s third quarter after it added 460,000 digital-only subscribers, getting closer to its goal of 15 million subscribers by 2027.
The company saw its total subscription revenues increase by 9.1% to $494.6 million, while its digital-only revenues increased by 14% to $367.4 million. The latter was boosted by its company bundles, which offer the newspaper in addition to services like Games, Cooking and the Athletic, which the company said helped offset a decrease in news-only subscriptions. Its total subscriber number was 12.33 million.
Its digital ad revenue increased by 20.3% after it saw strong demand among advertisers and a new supply of ads. It also acknowledged a $2.4 million pre-tax cost related to its ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.
“Q3 was another great quarter across the board at The Times and our results demonstrate that our strategy is working as designed,” New York Times Co. CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said in a statement. “We saw strong revenue growth and we are generating significant free cash flow. We are confident in our ability to widen the number of people who use and engage deeply with The Times.
That means becoming more essential to even more people. And as we do that, we expect to deliver more value for shareholders and society.”
Net income: $81.6 billion, up 27.3% year over year, compared to $64.1 billion a year ago.
Earnings Per Share: Diluted earnings per share of 50 cents. Excluding certain items, adjusted EPS came in at 59 cents per share, compared to 53 cents per share expected by analysts surveyed by Yahoo Finance.
Total Revenue: $700.8 million, up 9.5% year over year, compared to $692 million expected by analysts surveyed by Yahoo Finance.
While the paper saw its digital subscribers and digital average revenue per user climb (3.6% to $9.79 per user), its print offerings took another hit as subscribers shifted online. Print subscription revenue decreased 3% to $127.2 million, primarily due to lower domestic home-delivery and fewer single-copy sales.
The company said it had $1.1 billion in cash on hand. It said part of its net cash amount during the first nine months was because of lower cash tax payments due to President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
On the company’s investor call, which did not mention Trump or his ongoing lawsuit against the paper, Levien touted how the paper has tackled video, including its new “Watch” tab in the Times’ app. She said the company is still in the “early days” of video, but it sees it as a way of engaging its audience both on and off the Times app and gives its journalists ways of “humanizing” their work.
The company has turned most of its audio podcasts into video ones, she said, and it is weaving video into Cooking (through instructional videos) and the Athletic (by incorporating NFL game footage).
That means, she said, giving the medium space to grow before the company thinks about incorporating advertising into it.
“The more we do that, the more opportunity I think it opens up across all of our revenue lines,” Levien said.
Levien also touted the company’s use of AI. She said more subscribers are using the Times’ Automated Voice feature to listen to its articles, and it was using AI to improve targeted marketing tactics. AI is also powering features like metric conversion for Cooking and Wirecutter, she said.
While the company didn’t break out the Athletic’s performance — “as promised,” Huber Research analyst Doug Arthur said — Levien said the company remained “very pleased” with the brand’s work and said it was still on track to meet its internal expectations. She touted the incorporation of NFL footage, which followed its partnership with the NBA for game footage.
“We’re combining that with our signature journalism in our reporting, and I think that’s a great product experience for engagement,” she said. “NFL is a huge part of what the athletic covers, and we’re continuing to build audience and awareness for the brand athletic, and I would just say it’s all going well.”
