The New York Times saw its stock dip 9% as investors expressed concern about its spending, all while the paper pulled in $802.3 million in revenue in 2025’s fourth quarter and beat analyst expectations.
The Times added 450,000 digital subscribers in the fourth quarter and saw its digital advertising revenue increase by nearly 25% over the year prior. The company ended 2025 with 1.4 million digital-only subscribers added in the year, bringing the paper closer to its goal of 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027. It finished the quarter with 12.78 million total subscribers.
About 12.21 million of its total subscribers were digital-only subscribers, and more than half of those (6.48 million) subscribed to the Times through its bundle offerings. The Times bundles its newspaper with products such as Games, Cooking, its product-recommendation site Wirecutter and its sports website, the Athletic. It also offers family subscriptions.
Still, its operating costs increased by 10.5% over the same quarter the year before, which the Times attributed to a higher cost of revenue and administrative costs. Its operating profit increased by 10.2 percent, a dip from its third-quarter increase of 36.6% from the corresponding quarter the year prior.
The Times’ digital-only subscription revenue increased by 13.9% to $381.5 million, while its total subscription revenue increased 9.4% to $510.5 million. Print subscription revenue decreased by 2% due to a decrease in home deliveries and single-copy sales.
“The fourth quarter capped another strong year for The Times, and our results demonstrated that our strategy continues to work as designed,” New York Times Co. CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said in a statement on Wednesday. “Our world-class news coverage and premium lifestyle products proved more valuable to more people in 2025. We have confidence that in 2026, we can deliver another year of healthy growth in subscribers, revenue, and profitability, as well as strong free cash flow.”
Net income: $129.8 million, up 4.9% year over year, compared to $TK million a year ago.
Earnings Per Share: Diluted earnings per share of 79 cents. Excluding certain items, adjusted EPS came in at 89 cents per share, compared to 88 cents per share expected by analysts surveyed by Yahoo Finance.
Total Revenue: $802.3 million, up 10.4% year over year, compared to $791.5 million expected by analysts surveyed by Yahoo Finance.
During a conference call, Levien acknowledged that the media industry is “operating in a polarized, low-trust environment shaped by a few powerful platforms whose actions create headwinds for publishers.” But, she said, the Times’ strategy of diversifying its portfolio between news, Games, the Athletic and Cooking cements its long-term growth.
“While others have been doing less of it, we continue to thoughtfully invest, making what we do more rare and more valuable to more people,” she said.
Levien also said the paper’s continued investment in video, combined with the decline in linear television, allows it to see “long-term opportunity to establish the Times as a preferred brand for watching news in addition to reading and listening.”
The Times has put its journalists in front of cameras for both its podcasts and through vertical videos that explain their journalism, a full-throated approach that reflects how much audiences are consuming content through platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
Levien told one investor that the paper plans to pursue more “visual investigations” with its reporters and said the paper has seen success from its “Watch” tab on its app. “It’s early days,” she said.
“We’re very, very happy with what we’re seeing there so far, and then also putting more of our video on all the places people engage with news off-platform, which we think is a really important part of our long-term engaged audience growth strategy,” she said.
On threats from AI, Levien said the technology posed “headwinds” to news publishers, but she said that the Times’ approach to diversifying its offerings beyond simply news allows it to remain “really resilient” in the face of them. The paper is currently embroiled in lawsuits against OpenAI and Perplexity AI for allegedly violating its copyright, though the paper has experimented with AI for in-house systems.
“We believe what we do is going to be even more valuable to consumers and to business partners, and ultimately, even the [large-language models] themselves, in an information ecosystem where it’s harder and harder to find things that are true and valuable and worthwhile,” she said.
The paper is also actively negotiating a new contract with its union, aiming to complete its negotiations before its current agreement expires at the end of the month. Levien told another investor that the Times has “a long history of working with a number of unions” at the paper and believes it was “well prepared to move through this contract period as we have been in the past.”
