Almost a third of New York Times digital subscribers now exclusively subscribe to one of its non-news products, its annual report shows.
In its full-year results for 2024 The New York Times Company reported ending the year with 10.8 million digital subscribers — an increase of 1.1 million compared with the end of 2023.
Of those 10.8 million subscribers, 3.5 million (or 32%) subscribed only to either its Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, Audio or The Athletic products.
Another 1.9 million had a conventional news-only digital subscription that provides access past the nytimes.com paywall and a further 5.4 million had either an “All Access” bundled subscription, which buys access to all the Times’ products, or some other mix of NYT subscriptions.
In the fourth quarter of 2023 “other single-product” subscribers made up 28% of NYT digital subscribers, a figure that has climbed by one percentage point in each quarter since.
Although these subscribers do not have access to the main New York Times website, some will access its sports journalism via The Athletic or via its paid audio product, which includes podcasts like The Daily and launched in October.
Games hosts the NYT’s famous Wordle and crossword puzzles, Wirecutter is a product review service and Cooking is a recipes archive.
The New York Times has strongly encouraged users toward its bundled subscription offer in recent years as it provides the company with higher average revenue per user (ARPU) than any of its single-product subscriptions.
The company has done this through a mix of generous promotional pricing — for example offering the bundle at a price comparable to a single-product Games subscription — and by effectively withdrawing the option to buy a news-only subscription from its website.
An All Access subscription currently officially costs $25 a month, but is available at an “introductory” rate of $2 a month — cheaper than the non-discounted cost of a Games subscription ($4.99).
[Read more: Bundled — Inside The New York Times’ revenue growth strategy]
The effort to move subscribers onto the bundle appears to have focused on news-only subscribers rather than other single-product subscribers, with the number of people paying solely for the NYT’s news offer falling 30% from 2.7 million in Q4 2023 to 1.9 million in Q4 2024.
Bundled subscribers rose 29% to 5.4 million over the same period and single-product subscribers rose 26%. The overall number of subscribers increased by 12% year-on-year.
Across the company, digital-only ARPU rose from $9.24 to $9.65. ARPU for bundle subscribers increased from $12.13 in Q4 2023 to $12.53 last quarter, while news-only ARPU rose from $10.38 to $11.95.
Single-product ARPU, on the other hand, remained largely static, rising two cents over the year to $3.58.
The number of print New York Times subscribers meanwhile dropped from 660,000 to 610,000 across the year.
Full-year operating profit at The New York Times increased 4% from 2023 to $351m while total revenues rose 8% to $2.6bn. Quarterly profit in Q4 was up 20.2% year-on-year to $146.6m.
While subscription revenue rose by 8% to $1.7bn, advertising remained largely flat at $506.3m, which the company attributed to a print advertising declines.
The Athletic, which reported its first profitable quarter in Q3 2024, stayed in the black, increasing quarterly profit from $2.6m to $3.5m.
The company said its ongoing litigation against Microsoft and OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement for the training of AI chatbot ChatGPT cost it $3.2m before tax in 2024.
[Read more: ‘Millions’ of NYT and NY Daily News stories taken by OpenAI for training data]
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