Post-Trump Bump? New York Times Sees 301K New Subscriptions in First Quarter of 2021
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The New York Times has continued to see subscription growth in 2021, according to a Times first-quarter earnings report released Wednesday, despite former President Donald Trump’s 2017 prediction that newspapers, among other forms of media, would “tank” if he wasn’t in office.
In the first quarter of 2021, total Times subscriptions went from 7.5 million to 7.8 million, with 301,000 new digital subscriptions across the Times’ News, Cooking, Games, and audio sections. Digital news-only subscriptions grew by 167,000, and digital non-news Times products, such as the Times famed crossword puzzles or NYT Cooking, grew from 1.6 million to 1.7 million. Print subscriptions generally remained static at around 800,000.
The Times has also seen more year-to-date growth in the first quarter of 2021, with $329,000 in subscription revenues, than in 2020, when that number was at $286,000.
According to a Times press release about the quarterly report, Meredith Kopit Levien, president and CEO of the New York Times Company, said that in terms of subscription growth, the Times expects 2021 to look more like 2019.
“The fundamental drivers of our business – audience, registered readers, and subscriber engagement – are stronger than in 2019 and position us well for long-term growth,” Levien said. “In February and March, our audiences declined from their historic highs last year, and we saw fewer net subscription additions in the latter part of the quarter. We expect moderated growth to continue through the second quarter, traditionally our softest of the year. With lower forecasted second-quarter performance, we now expect annual total net subscription additions to be in the range of our 2019 before, which, prior to 2020, was our best year for net additions.”
2020 was a historic year for the Times in terms of subscriptions, particularly in the third quarter, when subscriptions soared to more than seven million paid subscribers, a high for the company. It was the first time the publisher brought in more revenue from online readers than print subscribers, according to a Times report. By the end of the year, the Times had set a subscription record, adding 2.3 million digital-only subscriptions in 2020, more than in any previous year.
According to an Axios study at the end of last year, subscriptions for both the Times and the Washington Post had tripled since 2016, when Trump was elected president. The “Trump effect” on news media has been analyzed time and time again, and while cable news ratings have dropped since President Joe Biden took office, the fact that the Times is now reporting increased subscriptions may indicate a post-Trump increase in people interested in getting news, and other content, from the digital versions of traditional news media.
