NY Times sets 2019 subscription record

Last year saw The New York Times setting a company record for digital subscription growth by adding more than 1 million net new digital-only subscribers. Now, the company has more than 5.2 million total subscribers, including print and digital.

Mark Thompson, president and CEO commented, “2019 was a record-setting year for The New York Times’s digital subscription business, the best since the Company launched digital subscriptions almost nine years ago. That success is a testament to the extraordinary work of Times journalists around the world and also to the radically different way that we’re running digital operations at the company, with cross-disciplinary teams who enjoy significant autonomy and access to the machine learning, engineering and testing capabilities they need to move our business forward.”

He further addressed a 13 percent increase for the company’s digital product.

“This week we begin to roll-out a price rise to a subset of our tenured digital-only news subscription base, which is the first price rise since the launch of the pay model in 2011. Since then, we’ve not only seen nine years of rising prices but also unprecedented investment by The Times in its journalism and digital offerings and we believe that our loyal subscribers know that their financial contribution plays an essential role in maintaining the quality, breadth, and depth of the report they value so much,” he added.

A few highlights include:

• 5,251,000 million total subscribers, including print and digital
• The Times added 342,000 net new digital-only subscribers in Q4, a 35% increase over Q4 2018, and 134% more than Q4 2017.
• Of that total, 67.8%, or 232,000, subscribed to The New York Times’ news.
• The remaining 32.2%, or 110,000, subscribed to NYT Cooking or Crosswords.

More details here.