The Times Company’s balance sheet surpassed $1 billion in cash as it continued to build its free cash flow, a measure of financial health. Compared with the third quarter of 2019, a more typical year, ad revenue was down 2.3 percent, however. Subscription revenues rose 13.8 percent, to $342.6 million, from last year.Īfter a down period last year, when the economy slowed at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, many companies were once again buying ads for both the print newspaper and the Times site, lifting ad revenues by 40 percent, to $110.9 million. Operating costs rose nearly as much, to $460.1 million, or 18.8 percent. The company reported adjusted operating profit of $65.1 million, a 15 percent increase over the same quarter a year ago, on $509.1 million of revenue, a 19.3 percent rise. Levien attributed the gains in the quarter to “a busy news period,” as well as improved retention of subscribers and new initiatives meant to turn casual readers into paying customers. Roughly 12 percent of its subscriptions are international. The Times also hit a milestone, passing one million subscriptions outside the United States, the company said. The number of print subscriptions fell to 795,000 in the July-through-September quarter, from 831,000 in the same three-month period last year, a decline in keeping with trends affecting the news industry as a whole. Of The Times’s nearly 8.4 million total subscriptions, 7.6 million are now digital.
“This was our best third-quarter performance in both News and total net subscription additions since the launch of the digital pay model more than a decade ago, and, outside of 2020, our best quarter ever for digital subscription additions,” Meredith Kopit Levien, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement.
The rest came for Games, Cooking and Wirecutter, the product review site that started offering subscriptions in September. Of the new digital subscriptions, 320,000 signed up for The Times’s journalism. The New York Times Company said on Wednesday that it added 455,000 new digital subscriptions in the third quarter, a gain that keeps the publisher on pace to reach its stated goal of 10 million subscriptions by 2025.
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