The New York Times Digital Subscriptions Jump 14% in First Quarter
The New York Times is off to a strong start to 2025, according to its first quarter earnings report released on Wednesday morning, with the paper adding 240,000 digital subscribers between January and March — up 14% compared to the gains it made a year prior. The Times also increased sales more than 7% year-over-year, hitting $635.9 million in first quarter revenue.
That subscriber growth indicates readers have been turning to the paper in the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term — although the paper did not mention the president, or coverage of tariffs, as subscription drivers during the first quarter.
The Times Chief Financial Officer William Bardeen did acknowledge the tariffs on the company’s earnings call on Wednesday morning, saying “the impact of tariffs on our business has been immaterial to date.” And he did not seem too concerned about the tariffs hurting ad revenue moving forward. Bardeen, when asked about the tariffs by an analyst on the call, said the Times has “engaged audiences that marketers can target effectively.”
CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, in a statement accompanying the Times’ earnings report, said the latest quarter showed its “strategy is working and our business is growing and demonstrating resilience amidst the current economic and geopolitical uncertainty.”
The Times spent $1 million on legal fees tied to its ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft; the paper has accused the ChatGPT parent company of using its reporting to train its models without consent.
Here are the key results:
Revenue: $635.9 million, up 7.1% year-over-year and slightly ahead of analyst estimates of $635.14 million from Zacks Investment Research.
Notably, sales for The Athletic, the digital sports outlet the Times bought in 2022 for $550 million, increased nearly 28% year-over-year to $47.60 million.
Nearly $71 million was attributed to digital ad sales during the first quarter, which was up more than 12% from a year ago.
Total subscribers: 11.66 million — up 230,000 from the previous quarter and up roughly 1.1 million from the same time last year.
Most of those subscribers — 11.06 million — are digital-only. Digital subscriber growth of 240,000 helped offset a slight decline for print-only customers; those 240,000 new digital subscribers represented a 14% year-over-year increase from the 210,000 the paper added during the first quarter of 2024.
Net income: $49.55 million, up 22.60% from the same period a year prior.
Earnings Per Share: Adjusted EPS of $0.41 was better than the $0.35 analysts had estimated.
Heading into Wednesday, the Times’ stock price had increased 15% over the last month — helping offset a dip that happened in Feb. For the year, NYT’s share price was up 0.67% to $52.66 before its first quarter report was released.
In other recent news for the Times, the paper at the end of Apr. announced announced its popular “The Daily” podcast is adding two new co-hosts, Rachel Abrams and Natalie Kitroeff, alongside veteran host Michael Barbaro. “The Daily,” which launched in 2017, is currently the fifth ranked show on Spotify’s podcast chart in the U.S. The Times did not mention its podcast business in its first quarter report.
The Times, in its report, indicated customers are gravitating towards its bundle packages, which give subscribers access to its games and NYT Cooking, among other offerings, along with its news content. During the quarter, the Times’ bundle customers increased 330,000 to 5.76 million.
A few other points that stood out from the report: The Times made approximately $33 million off the sale of about “four acres of excess land at our printing and distribution facility in College Point, N.Y.” in February. And the company repurchased roughly $59 million in sales as part of a stock buyback program.
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