New York Times Continues Growth in Post-Trump Era, Adding 455K Subscribers
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Despite shrinking print subscriptions, the New York Times announced Wednesday that its net profit rose by 63% in this year’s third quarter — thanks in large part to the addition of nearly half a million new digital subscribers.
The surge in new subscribers bucks a trend felt throughout the media world as cable networks, local newsrooms, and online media continue to contract in an ever changing landscape and without former President Donald Trump dominating headlines.
The New York Times’ first “Trump bump” took place in the fourth quarter of 2016, in which it added 276,000 subscribers to its news products. The month after Trump was inaugurated, the company announced it was “the single best quarter since 2011, the year the pay model launched.” The bump was five times the growth of the fourth quarter of 2015, when it added only 53,000 subscribers.
However, that pales in comparison to the 627,000 subscribers the company added in the fourth quarter of 2020 – with about 425,000 of those signing up for news products.
New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said at the time that “2020 was a year none of us could have imagined: The pandemic, its devastating human toll and its many economic reverberations; a national reckoning over race and social justice; a bitterly contested US presidential election and an unending hunger for relief from it all.”
While the 455,000 new digital subscribers the company just added is a drop from 2020 highs, it shows a remarkable resilience for the company in the current media climate.
As Mediaite Editor in Chief Aidan McLaughlin pointed out Tuesday, a big story coming out of the October cable news ratings is the fact that all three major cable networks are down in viewership year-over-year.
Compared to October of 2020, Fox News is down 38 percent in total viewers, while MSNBC is down 54 percent and CNN is down 65 percent.
While many media observers note that President Joe Biden is not filling the void that Trump left in the news cycle and that many viewers may be tired of Covid-19 coverage, Levien attributed her company’s subscriber growth in the third quarter to “a busy news period.” So, while Trump may have once dubbed himself the media’s “golden goose,” the New York Times seems to be moving right on past him.
