There is little doubt that Donald J. Trump’s presidency has helped lift The Times’s subscription business, and the readership numbers have risen at a steady pace during his years in office. The company set a goal of 10 million subscribers by 2025, a mark that appears within striking distance.
“The continued demand for quality, original, independent journalism across a range of topics makes us even more optimistic about the size of the total market for digital journalism subscriptions and our position in it,” Ms. Levien said.
The company added 393,000 digital subscribers during the three months, bringing the total of paid online readers to more than six million. Of that group, about 4.7 million pay for the core news product, with the rest subscribing to the crossword and cooking apps. An additional 831,000 readers continued to pay for print subscriptions, a drop from last year, reflecting a steady decline in the broadsheet business.
The jump in digital readers fell short of the paper’s record-breaking run in the second quarter as the coronavirus pandemic raged across the country, but the performance was enough to lift total digital revenue. Online sales are now on a pace to exceed print operations for the first time on an annual basis.
But a worrying trend might be this: Digital readers were the only growth business for The Times. Every other unit fell. As online subscription revenue rose 34 percent, to $155.3 million, print subscriptions decreased 3.8 percent to $145.7 million. And advertising sales, once the lifeblood of the newspaper business, dropped 30 percent, to $79.3 million. The pandemic has cut even deeper into ad sales, which were already falling as fewer people read the paper in print and many companies cut their marketing budgets.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/business/media/new-york-times-q3-2020-earnings-nyt.html
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.