Subscription insights from New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger

The New York Times is regularly cited as one of subscription publishing’s success stories, and for good reason: It’s amassed nearly 10 million digital-only subscribers which generated over $1 billion in revenue in 2023.

The company’s publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, provided some valuable insights into how NYT is thinking about the subscription model in a wide-ranging interview with The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. They included:

Thinking bigger with subscriptions

Some industry observers have argued in recent years that news publishers have reached “peak subscription”, or that a “great subscription reversal” is underway because a handful have struggled to make the model work. According to Sulzberger, those assessments are thinking far too small.

At the height of print media, he estimates that 150-200 million news subscriptions were held in the U.S. among a much smaller population. That implies significant room for news subscription growth, he argued.

“If you add up all the news subscriptions in this country today, I don’t know what that number would be, but I would guess that it is closer to 30-40 million. That’s significantly less than Paramount+, which is not exactly a successful streamer. We are not even sniffing at Hulu or Netflix or Amazon Prime. We are still many factors smaller than those players. I don’t think that our industry can or should accept that we are going to collectively be smaller than an eighth-grade streamer,” he said.

More than a Trump bump

The subscription growth seen in recent years by NYT and other major U.S. news publishers is often attributed in large part to the election of Donald Trump, but Sulzberger has a different diagnosis. He credits the rise of subscription streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify for normalizing the idea of paying for access to news more generally and suggests that any major news events can now help capitalize on growing underlying demand. 

“Trump’s election was an activating moment, where a whole bunch of people who were comfortable [paying for streaming services] said to themselves: ‘Wow, that seems like a big deal. I should probably be paying attention to the news.’ But look at the other great surges of subscriber interest. It’s similar moments where people felt like the world needed to be understood, like COVID-19 or the war in Ukraine,” he said.

Redefining the newspaper for the digital age

As Toolkits has noted previously, NYT’s digital strategy is now oriented around redefining the newspaper for the digital age. News, cooking, crosswords, and sports were once features of a broader product known as a newspaper. But as it’s shifted to digital, NYT has succeeded in repositioning each of those features as distinct products in consumers’ minds. 

“[Around our core news product] we’ve been really lucky to be able to build a handful of things that tap into people’s passions or everyday needs in a supportive way that deepens the relationship and increases loyalty. I don’t think it’s a radical strategy. It’s really similar to what newspapers used to be… We are trying to rebuild that sense of being a full-service restaurant to some extent,” Sulzberger said.

Pushing into new verticals

Despite the success of its unbundling and re-bundling strategy, Sulzberger implied the company will approach the addition of any new verticals carefully. Its acquisition of The Athletic in January 2022 was the last major addition to its digital product lineup.

“I am always open to great ideas, and so don’t want to close anything off. But I find it more valuable to double down on what we are doing than to put too many irons in the fire. I don’t think the number of spaces that are worth that level of giant intervention like The Athletic is unlimited,” he said.

Reaching new audience segments

The Times maintains its aggressive goal to reach 15 million digital subscribers by 2025. To do so it will need to continue attracting first-time subscribers, but Sulzberger said the company is reluctant to target specific audience segments or reader types. Rather, the company is focused on its product first and foremost.

“I think it’s really dangerous for an independent general interest news organization to chase a particular audience segment. That mindset leads one to distort coverage, especially in this highly polarised moment. Winning over a group too often means showing deference to that group’s narrative, and if an independent organization does that, it’s the most damaging thing that they can do… We don’t think about the audience in that way. We try to offer the very best journalism in a bunch of broadly important topics,” he said.