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- Thursday 8th February: Digital subscriptions worth $1 billion at the New York Times
Thursday 8th February: Digital subscriptions worth $1 billion at the New York Times
Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Peter.
Another quarter, another New York Times success story. The seemingly unstoppable subscription juggernaut has announced that, having added 300,000 paid digital subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2023, the company’s annual revenue for digital subscriptions has passed $1 billion for the first time.
At the end of 2023, the NYT had 10.36 million subscribers, 9.7 million of them digital-only. The company has a stated goal of 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027. Its strategy to bundle core news content with games like Wordle and Spelling Bee, product reviews from Wirecutter, and sports content from The Athletic, appears to be paying off.
The Athletic, bought two years ago, is still losing money but its operating loss shrank to $4.4 million, from $9.6 million a year earlier, with revenue up more than 30%. In an early contender for understatement of 2024 the company’s president and chief executive, Meredith Kopit Levien, said 2023 was “a strong year” for The Times.
The NYT might be raking it in, but subscription strategies are a long term bet calling for upfront spending on premium content. Many publishers don't have the cushion for that in the current ad slowdown and Axios is reporting a pivot away from hard paywalls to new reader revenue models that still seek direct payments from readers, but don't prevent news outlets from reaching wider audiences.
The data in this is skewed by the fact that, rather than representing an empirical ranking of popularity or success, these charts rely on podcasters mobilising their fanbases to get votes rather than counting downloads or listening time. But it’s still interesting to see what topics have the most engaged listners and while comedy dominates, true crime podcasts still have super-supportive fans.
Know a good sales freelancer with a bit of capacity? Singletrack World is looking. More details on our (fledgling) recruitment board in our community forum.
An unashamed shout out for this work being done in my homeland. The Scottish Beacon is a website that showcases work from 22 independent local and hyperlocal newsrooms across Scotland and I 100% agree with The Scottish Beacon’s founder and project manager, Rhiannon Davies when she says, “collaborative journalism projects can better hold power to account.”
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