The New York Times Company’s digital subscriptions and advertising surged in the latest quarter, leading to a 26.1 percent jump in adjusted operating profit compared with a year earlier, the company said on Wednesday.
The Times added 460,000 digital-only subscribers in the third quarter, the biggest three-month jump in years. Advertising revenue rose 20.3 percent from a year earlier, to $98.1 million.
Those results propelled revenue 9.5 percent higher, to $700.8 million, from the same period in 2024. Adjusted operating profit totaled $131.4 million.
The Times now has 12.33 million total subscribers to all of its products, which include the news report, Cooking, Games, Wirecutter and The Athletic. A major part of The Times’s strategy is the bundling of subscriptions, and more than half of subscribers now have a subscription to the whole bundle or multiple products.
The company has publicly said it is aiming to get to 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027.
“We are confident in our ability to widen the number of people who use and engage deeply with The Times,” Meredith Kopit Levien, the chief executive of the Times Company, said in a statement.
The net addition of 460,000 digital subscribers was the biggest gain for The Times since it began reporting on the number of subscribers instead of the number of individual subscriptions to different products. It made that change at the beginning of 2022. The company also had large subscriber jumps during the first Trump administration and the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Digital-only “average revenue per user,” which is a metric The Times uses to track one of the components of digital revenue growth, rose 3.6 percent, to $9.79, because of price increases for some subscribers and the transition of others from promotional prices to higher fees.
Revenue from affiliate referrals and licensing, such as those from Wirecutter, increased 7.9 percent year over year to $73.9 million.
Print subscriptions, however, continue to fall as subscribers switch to online offerings. They totaled 570,000, down 50,000 from the third quarter in 2024, and generated $127.2 million in revenue, a decrease of 3 percent.
Operating costs were up 5.8 percent year over year to $596 million. Adjusted operating profit was $131.4 million, down slightly from $133.8 million the previous quarter, with an adjusted operating profit margin of 18.7 percent.
One change in this quarterly report was that results for The Athletic, which The Times bought for $550 million in 2022, were no longer broken out. The Athletic, which had years of losses, started to turn a profit in the third quarter of 2024.
The Times Company had $1.1 billion in cash and marketable securities at the end of September, it said. It forecast a 13 to 16 percent increase in digital-only subscription revenue for the current quarter, and a percentage increase in the mid- to high teens in digital advertising revenue.
Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: [email protected]
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