By NIeman Lab
There are still votes left to be counted, but The New York Times is finished counting its third-quarter numbers, and we can project a winner: The Times now, for the first time, generates more revenue from its digital subscribers than from its print subscribers. And its total count of subscriptions passed 7 million for the first time last month.
As of Sept. 30, its number of digital news subscribers was up 45.9 percent over the previous year. Even better were its “other” digital subscriptions (mostly Games and Cooking), which were up 63.6 percent. (That nomenclature is a change, by the way: What the Times has for decades called “Crosswords” is now broadened to “Games” in the company’s filings. Spelling Bee remains on the march.) Print subs, meanwhile, were down 3.9 percent.
In all, that’s a year-over-year increase of more than 2 million digital subscriptions. (It took the Times more than four years from the launch of its digital paywall to hit 2 million subscribers total. Now that’s one year’s haul.) The Times added 393,000 digital subscribers in the quarter.
Subscription revenues increased 12.6 percent to $301 million and digital-only products revenue increased 34 percent to $155.3 million, making digital readership the only source of growth for The Times this quarter. Print subscription revenue decreased 3.8 percent to $145.7 million “largely due to lower retail newsstand revenue, while revenue from our domestic home delivery subscription products grew 2.5 percent.” Advertising remains a giant mess, down 12.6 percent in digital, an astonishing 46.5 percent in print, and 30.2 percent overall.
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