Complete Story
12/08/2016
How NY Times plans to reach 10 million digital subscribers
“The ambition of having 10 million digital subscribers is possible for us,” New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said Monday afternoon at the annual UBS Global Media Conference in New York City. While that’s still a long way away — the Times had about 1.6 million digital subscribers as of September, counting its crosswords product — we can see the overall progress that the Times is making on its 2020 strategy plan, goosed along by the now-two-year-old Innovation Report.
Here are the top five points from Thompson’s talk (which can be listened to as a webcast here).
The Times sold 200,000 (net) new subscriptions since October 1.
That’s an astounding run rate, by some measures 10× the rate of a year ago. Those new subscriptions are overwhelmingly digital, and may add $30 million or more to the Times’ top-line revenue — hugely needed,as the Times saw an 18 percent decrease in print advertising in the third quarter.
Donald Trump’s election drove a surge after Nov. 8. Even before that, though, the Times had doubled its subscription run rate in the third quarter; that’s the power of its journalism and its analytic smarts at converting semi-regular readers to subscribers. Further, the Times has toughened its relationship with Facebook. Visitors clicking on Times links from Facebook used to be able to read freely; now they hit the Times paywall after reading 10 articles. The Times has also cut back on its participation in Facebook Instant Articles. (I wrote more about this here.)
