The New York Times Tops 75 Million Subscriptions As Ads Decline
In its fourth-quarter earnings report, The New York Times Company said 2020 was its biggest year for adding subscribers.
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The New York Times set a record for its subscription business in 2020, a year when a pandemic, social unrest and a bitterly contested presidential race made headlines, the company said in an earnings report on Thursday.
After adding 2.3 million digital-only subscriptions in 2020, more than in any previous year, The Times exceeded 7.5 million subscriptions for its digital products and print newspaper, The New York Times Companys fourth-quarter report said.
The largest gains of 2020 occurred during two news-heavy periods. In the quarter that started in April, when a great number of Americans were weeks into a routine of working remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic, the company added 669,000 digital subscriptions. In the fourth quarter, which included Election Day, The Times had an increase of roughly 627,000 digital subscriptions.
In the fourth quarter, digital subscription revenue was $167 million, a 37 percent jump from the final months of 2019. For the year, it was $598.3 million, a 30 percent rise. Total subscription revenue in 2020 was up 10 percent, to $1.195 billion.
Public Editor Bias Warnings And Elimination
In 2003, the New York Times created the position of public editor, hiring respected and experienced journalists on two-year contracts to serve as ombudsmen who could provide accountability and transparency for the paper in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal. The NYTs public editors regularly addressed the topic of liberal bias at the paper, and consistently found the paper to have meaningful problems with a left-leaning worldview that impacted its journalism.
In 2004, then-NYT public editor Daniel Okrent answered the question, Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? with the sentence, Of course it is. He noted that on social issues such as same-sex marriage, Second Amendment rights, abortion, and environmental regulation, if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, youve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.
Okrent specifically called out the NYTs coverage of the same-sex marriage debate, calling it a very effective ad campaign for the gay marriage cause. He charged that while other newspapers such as the Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle had written balanced articles including potential negative impacts of policy change, On a topic that has produced one of the defining debates of our time, Times editors have failed to provide the three-dimensional perspective balanced journalism requires.
Digital Subscriptions Boost New York Times Revenue And Profits
More and more consumers are paying for subscriptions to read the content from companies like The New … York Times.
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For the last 20 years the American newspaper industry has cratered. Advertising revenue, as well as print subscriptions have declined, just like a falling knife. The local newspapers have been particularly hard hit and some have even closed-up entirely. But The New York Times has announced a big increase in their digital subscription revenue.
Print newspapers are becoming less and less popular.
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NYT , created paywalls much earlier than most news and information sources online. The Journal was particularly early to institute a paywall, starting in 1996. Most people in the digital news industry have considered the Journals subscription paywall more of an enterprise product and often a business expense for the subscribers.
The New York Times started charging for online content in 2011 and it was a modest revenue source at the time. But over the years, the advertising revenue from print, and even the advertising revenue on The Times digital services, has continued to decline. Meanwhile, the digital subscriptions for the New York Times, both for their flagship news brand, as well as for crossword puzzles and other a la carte offers for paid content, are growing rapidly.
Consumers are paying for access to the library of crossword puzzles from The New York Times.
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Nba Disputes Forbes Analysis Suggesting League Is Profitable
In a statement e-mailed to The Times, Tim Frank, a spokesman for the National Basketball Association, has disputed an analysis by Forbes Magazine suggesting that the N.B.A. turned a $183 million operating profit in its 2009-10 season. Instead, according to Mr. Frank, the league lost $340 million that year and has lost money every year during the current collective bargaining agreement.
Mr. Frank also disputes several other claims in the Forbes analysis, which was the basis of my article on the leagues financial condition this morning. In addition, he has disputed claims about the leagues accounting procedures and financial condition made by other sources cited in the article, and the attendant characterizations about them in the FiveThirtyEight analysis.
Mr. Franks full statement is reproduced below:
One specific point of clarification: the Hornets leaked financial data reported a $6.4 million loss in 2007-8 but a $5.9 million gain in 2008-9. By comparison, the Forbes data estimated a $3 million gain in 2007-8 but a small loss of less than $1 million in 2008-9. The difference between the two figures an average of about $1.5 million over the two-year period is small. Mr. Frank, however, is referring to the Hornets financial performance in 2009-10, which was not detailed in the leaked data.
I look forward to continuing to report on the story as further information becomes available.
A Closer Look At New York Times’ Earnings
In high finance, the key ratio used to measure how well a company converts reported profits into free cash flow is the accrual ratio . In plain english, this ratio subtracts FCF from net profit, and divides that number by the company’s average operating assets over that period. This ratio tells us how much of a company’s profit is not backed by free cashflow.
Therefore, it’s actually considered a good thing when a company has a negative accrual ratio, but a bad thing if its accrual ratio is positive. While it’s not a problem to have a positive accrual ratio, indicating a certain level of non-cash profits, a high accrual ratio is arguably a bad thing, because it indicates paper profits are not matched by cash flow. To quote a 2014 paper by Lewellen and Resutek, “firms with higher accruals tend to be less profitable in the future”.
Over the twelve months to September 2020, New York Times recorded an accrual ratio of -0.13. That implies it has good cash conversion, and implies that its free cash flow solidly exceeded its profit last year. Indeed, in the last twelve months it reported free cash flow of US$233m, well over the US$158.3m it reported in profit. New York Times shareholders are no doubt pleased that free cash flow improved over the last twelve months.
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Profitable New York Times Co Readies Big Expansion Plans As Most Newspaper Companies Continue To Contract
It is almost certainly a coincidence that the New York Times released its fourth quarter 2018 financial results the Wednesday after the Super Bowl, but, as expected, the report turned out to be a sort of victory parade.
Once again, the Times grew its paid digital subscription base, gaining 265,000 for the quarter to a total of 3.4 million digital subscribers. Of that, 172,000 were for its news site, while the rest accounted for its crossword and cooking verticals.
At a time when weekly layoff and buyout programs have become common elsewhere in the industry, the Times added 120 journalism positions over the course of 2018. That brings its newsroom total to 1,600, the highest ever. The number is likely to rise in 2019 and beyond.
And there is lots more expansion on tap. Executives told financial analysts in a conference call Wednesday that the company will roll out a parenting site and a new set of games for the curious and intelligent.
The Weekly, a video adaptation of The Times industry-leading podcast, The Daily, will debut in June. CEO Mark Thompson said that The Weekly is already profitable on a cash basis even before the launch, since it was commissioned by the FX cable channel and Hulu streaming service.
For The Times main business, the report was a highlight reel:
Only 16 percent of digital subscribers are outside the United States, leaving a very big opportunity to grow that market, Kopit Levien said.
Does Jeff Bezos Influence The Washington Post
Bezos purchased the Post for $250 million in August 2013. When Jeff Bezos acquired the Post, in 2013, he fundamentally changed our strategy and that was to go from being a news organization that was focussed primarily on our region to being a news organization that would be national, and even international.
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I Want To Make A Profit
Staying Alive
The struggles of a business trying to survive.
I have a problem: my business is not very profitable. Over the last three full years, 2010-12, our sales totaled $5,606,056. But our profits were only $81,646. Thats a pathetic 1.4-percent profit margin.
My only consolation is that this is a vast improvement over the six preceding years. During the last boom-and-bust cycle in the economy, from 2003-9, my company lost $902,492 on sales totaling $10,628,216. Ouch. I can blame that performance on poor management, by the Partner and myself, with a little extra help from the crash in 2008. Excuses aside, its a dismal record.
I have done a lot of things well in my 27-year career, but you can hardly call me a business success. I want to do better. After getting a handle on cash flow, setting up an effective Internet sales effort, learning how to close deals and implementing a long list of changes on the shop floor, I want my company to be solidly profitable.
I have three reasons for this. First, I want confirmation that my basic approach to business works. There are lots of companies that reach profitability by riding their employees hard, resisting any inclination to overpay and squeezing every last drop of effort out of the staff. I dont have the stomach to run my shop that way. I have long tried to treat my people well, to pay them enough to have a real life and to provide a package of benefits that supports their ability to start families and live decently.
Who Is The New York Times Audience
The New York Times is targeted at an urban audience and while a local paper, has readers throughout the country and around the world. In 2016 The New York Times had 9.32 million daily readers. In a report released by Pew Research, 32 percent of those who regularly read the New York Times are less than the age of 30.
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New York Times V Sullivan
The paper’s involvement in a 1964 libel case helped bring one of the key United States Supreme Court decisions supporting freedom of the press, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. In it, the United States Supreme Court established the “actual malice” standard for press reports about public officials or public figures to be considered defamatory or libelous. The malice standard requires the plaintiff in a defamation or libel case to prove the publisher of the statement knew the statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. Because of the high burden of proof on the plaintiff, and difficulty proving malicious intent, such cases by public figures rarely succeed.
This Story Is Part Of A Group Of Stories Called
Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing and changing us.
Ben Smith spent eight years building BuzzFeeds news operation into a place that could compete with the New York Times. Now hes going to work for the New York Times.
Smith, BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief, will become the Times new media columnist in March. That position was filled by the Timess Jim Rutenberg for the past four years, but it is known in and outside of the paper as a platform created by the legendary David Carr, who died in 2015.
It makes perfect sense that the Times would want to hire Smith, a politics and media junkie with deep interest in the connections between Washington, New York, and Silicon Valley.
And Smith is one of several high-profile hires the Times has made from digital news operations. Its a marked evolution from 2014, when the paper commissioned an internal report about how to compete with the likes of BuzzFeed and Vox.
Smiths departure from BuzzFeed immediately raised questions about the future of that organizations well-regarded, money-losing news team, which he constructed himself. It also leaves BuzzFeed with two major hires to make: In addition to a successor to Smith, the company is still looking to hire a president to work under CEO Jonah Peretti as its top business executive. NBCs Dylan Byers first reported Smiths move.
Its been eight years. So its not like hes flighty, he added.
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Accusations Of Liberal Bias
In mid-2004, the newspaper’s then-public editor Daniel Okrent, wrote an opinion piece in which he said that The New York Times did have a liberal bias in news coverage of certain social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. He stated that this bias reflected the paper’s cosmopolitanism, which arose naturally from its roots as a hometown paper of New York City, writing that the coverage of the Times‘s Arts & Leisure Culture and the Sunday Times Magazine trend to the left.
If you’re examining the paper’s coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide if your value system wouldn’t wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you’re traveling in a strange and forbidding world.
Times public editor Arthur Brisbane wrote in 2012:
When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism for lack of a better term that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.
Americas Most Profitable Export Is Cash
Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform Why We Need It and What It Will Take.
Two things Ive heard my whole life that always seem within reach but have never occurred are that we will move to paperless offices and a cashless society. In theory, it seems simple enough computers and the Internet should obviate the need for paper, and credit and debit cards and electronic bill pay should make cash superfluous.
Today’s Economist
Perspectives from expert contributors.
Among the reasons for the rise in cash holdings are convenience, dependability and anonymity. Another key factor is the decline in interest rates, which has reduced the opportunity cost of holding cash relative to such interest-earning assets as bank deposits, money market funds and Treasury bills.
Many economists believe that the rise in cash is strongly related to growth in the so-called underground economy criminal activity such as drug dealing, as well as tax evasion by people working off the books for cash. Strong evidence for this proposition comes from examining the distribution of cash holdings by denomination.
As one can see, 84 percent of the increase in cash since 1990 has been in the form of $100 bills, which have risen to 77 percent of the value of cash outstanding in 2012 from 52 percent in 1990.
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Our Take On New York Times’ Profit Performance
As we discussed above, New York Times has perfectly satisfactory free cash flow relative to profit. Because of this, we think New York Times’ earnings potential is at least as good as it seems, and maybe even better! And the EPS is up 58% annually, over the last three years. The goal of this article has been to assess how well we can rely on the statutory earnings to reflect the company’s potential, but there is plenty more to consider. So if you’d like to dive deeper into this stock, it’s crucial to consider any risks it’s facing. In terms of investment risks, we’ve identified 2 warning signs with New York Times, and understanding them should be part of your investment process.
Today we’ve zoomed in on a single data point to better understand the nature of New York Times’ profit. But there are plenty of other ways to inform your opinion of a company. Some people consider a high return on equity to be a good sign of a quality business. So you may wish to see this free collection of companies boasting high return on equity, or this list of stocks that insiders are buying.
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