The New York Times Company announced Wednesday that it added 190,000 digital subscribers in the last quarter. This is in part due to his subscriptions to a range of products, including The Athletic sports site, which has brought the company’s total digital subscriber base to 9 million.
Adjusted operating income was $54 million, down 11% from the prior year period. This was as new subscription revenue was offset by higher operating costs and lower advertising revenue.
“In the first quarter, we made steady progress on our significant subscription strategy and showed clear signs of a substantial runway,” Meredith Kopit Levien, CEO of The Times, said in a statement. increase.
For the past decade, The Times has sought to make up for the decline in its profitable but declining print business with new revenue from digital subscribers. In recent years, the company has honed its strategy by offering readers an array of online utilities, including a cooking app, a Wirecutter online shopping service, and games such as Wordle and The Athletic, pitching subscribers as a guide to the wider world. I was.
The company said it had about 9.7 million print and digital subscribers at the end of the first quarter, up about 8% from the same period last year. About 710,000 of them were print subscribers, down about 10% from the same period last year.
The Times was unaffected by the advertising slump across the sector. Advertising revenue in the first quarter was $106 million, down about 8.6% from the same period last year, according to the company. This is due to lower spending in the technology and finance categories. Luxury advertising remains resilient and grew last quarter.
Last year, The Athletic, which the company bought for $550 million in cash, had 3.3 million subscribers at the end of the third quarter, more than double the number in the same period last year. Nonetheless, The Athletic’s loss he had was $7.8 million, up about 14% year-over-year.
The company said The Athletic’s losses appeared more pronounced as it only owned the site for two of the three months in the first quarter of 2022.
The New York Times announced on Tuesday that it has named William Bardeen, the company’s chief strategy officer, as the company’s new chief financial officer. Bardeen said he will succeed Roland Caputo, who has been with the company for nearly 20 years.
