NYT Is Nearly Halfway to 10 Million Subs. Can the Paper Reach Its Goal By 2025?

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Earlier this year, the New York Times announced an ambitious goal: to reach 10 million subscribers by 2025.

The paper’s third-quarter earnings report reveals that it is just about halfway to that benchmark as 2020 nears — not exactly a sure indication the company will hit its mark but a promising sign nonetheless.

The Times now has 4.9 million total subscriptions across print and digital, the paper announced, having added 273,000 subscribers over the past three months. Among those new subscribers, the Times said that 209,000 were for the digital news product while the rest were for the paper’s popular cooking and crossword products.

Times CEO Mark Thompson was sanguine in a statement announcing the earnings, describing this period as the paper’s “best ever third quarter for new digital news subscriptions.”

He added that the Times was “on track” to hit the 10 million mark by 2025, estimating that it will need to have garnered at least two million international subscriptions to achieve that goal. The company currently has 500,000 subscribers from outside markets.

In recent years, the Times has targeted audiences in Canada and Australia, and it has had success with those efforts as it seeks to transform itself into a global brand.

But in order to expand its international reach, the Times will most likely have to make inroads into other places including India, a promising but “notoriously price-conscious” market, according to Raju Narisetti, a professor of professional practice and director of the Knight-Bagehot fellowship in economics and business journalism at Columbia University.

“Until now,” Narisetti told Mediaite, “no Western news brand has really been able to figure that one out despite several false starts.”

Thompson first announced that the Times was angling for 10 million subscribers in 2016, when at the end of the year the paper first surpassed three million total subscribers. But the Times only specified a deadline this February after it had experienced a sharp increase in its subscriber base — attributed in part to the Trump presidency.

The Trump era has coincided with a massive spike in subscriptions for the Times, which surpassed 1 million digital-only subscribers in 2015 and has been increasing its readership at a rapid clip since then.

Media analyst Ken Doctor told Mediaite that he could envision a future in which the Times reaches its target as the paper continues to expand internationally and attracts digital subscribers as well as those who pay for its non-news-related products.

Yet it still has a number of potential obstacles to overcome, including a possible recession as well as what Doctor described as a “Trump slump,” which could make people less dedicated to minute-by-minute news.

Despite the paper’s increase in readership, the Times also reported a decline in digital advertising revenue of 5.4 percent, which caused shares to dip slightly following the earnings announcement — though total revenue was up 2.7 percent to $428.5 million compared with the same quarter last year.

On the whole, though, the Times’ 10 million mark is “distinctly achievable,” Doctor said. “They’re hitting their marks.”