New York Times adds 455K subscriptions in latest quarter

The New York Times gained nearly half a million digital subscribers in the third quarter of 2021.

Around 320,000 of the subscribers who signed up over the last three months did so for the Times’s news content. The rest subscribed to alternative content platforms like Games, Cooking and Wirecutter, the newspaper reported.

The Times has previously stated that it’s aiming to hit 10 million subscribers by 2025. These new digital subscriptions keep it on track to reach that goal.

“This was our best third-quarter performance in both News and total net subscription additions since the launch of the digital pay model more than a decade ago, and, outside of 2020, our best quarter ever for digital subscription additions,” the CEO of the New York Times Company, Meredith Kopit Levien, said in a statement. 

The Times now has a reported 8.4 million subscribers, of which 7.6 million are digital. 

Levien said the subscriber growth in the third quarter was likely due to “a busy news period.”

In August, the Times said it had added a record percentage of subscriptions to platforms beyond its core news product in the second quarter. It also reported that it had a total operating profit of $73.3 million, up from the $28.8 million recorded during the same period in 2020. 

Later that month, the company announced it would launch several new subscription-only newsletters and make a handful of existing newsletters available only to paying subscribers.