As The New York Times gains a foothold in the digital news subscription business, the company's investment into quality journalism and expansion of non-news lifestyle offerings has been keeping the business growing.

Launching a paid subscription service in March 2011, The New York Times now has 11.43 million subscribers across print and digital as of the fourth quarter of 2024, adding 350,000 digital only subscribers from the previous quarter. The paper also aims to reach 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027.


As the digital business grows, Hannah Yang, chief growth and customer officer at The New York Times Company, and Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, president, international of the company, visited Korea University on Wednesday to give a special lecture under the topic of digital transformation and innovation.

Around 150 students filled the Cinema Trap auditorium of the Media Hall building, home to the university's College of Media & Communication. How legacy media deals with digital changes is one of the topics students will delve into during the Media Technology & Culture course, offered under the college.

“One thing we won't change is our unrelenting commitment to high quality journalism, we also realized that everything else needed to change,” said Dunbar-Johnson. “The only way that we were going to get people to come to us digitally is if we were going to create compelling high quality independent journalism.”

While The New York Times' digital subscription business is fueled by quality journalism and unique articles, its bundle strategy has also helped drive many subscribers.

News is The New York Times' main product, with other offerings such as the crossword game Wordle, recipes on Cooking and product reviews on Wirecutter are available through bundle subscriptions. Sports news is also provided to subscribers through The Athletic.

Developing a paying relationship wasn't the easiest, although the company started by offering discounted subscriptions for a long time and ensuring those early-tenure subscribers, colloquially referred to as ET subs, get the best The New York Times has to offer during the time.

“As we blew up the ET sub volume, I put a very big portion of our cross functional team's resources into having our ET subs engage with our content as much as possible,” said Yang. “For a couple of years, we had the smartest engineers, product marketers and designers just focused on our ET subs.”

“By the time they got to the end of the introduction period and it was time to pay the full price, they walked down the aisle. That ramping up of that relationship allowed us to keep the volume of subscribers large and average revenue per user going up the same time.”

The Korea JoongAng Daily sat down with Yang before the lecture, talking about the publication's digital products.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The New York Times has been seeing rapid growth in its digital subscribers. How has the company been able to achieve that?

The important driver of the business is our continued investment in journalism. The most important thing the company has done is to make sure we are making the newsroom as strong as possible and keeping that number growing. Now we almost have 3,000 journalists, which is double the size it was 10 years ago.

Then the other thing we did that's very important is growing audience. At the end of the day, audience is the source of everything. Growing audience and growing subscriptions at the same time is very hard to do. And that's because one of the most powerful things you can do to get somebody to subscribe is blocking them from reading things. Most people bounce from the blocking, and you get a small percentage of them to actually take out their credit card and subscribe. If you do too much blocking it's going to hurt your future audience because it impacts people coming back. It could also send a signal to search engines and could impact our rankings and search results. We have to be very careful about how we deploy friction, and we invested in our own algorithm to help us find out when is it the best time to put up friction.

Obviously news is the most important for The New York Times, but we also steadily grew our lifestyle products. We like to call our subscription products a solar system where news is the sun, and lifestyle products are the planets around the sun.


How have the lifestyle products been helpful to the subscription business?

The reason why those lifestyle products have been so helpful for our subscription business is that it brings new audiences. There can be people who may not want to go to news right away or didn't have a habit of reading news all the time, but are very passionate about those areas. That has helped us bring them to our total addressable market.

When we pull them in, they now have six or seven different ways to experience us throughout the year or even during the day that increases engagement. That is correlated with better retention for subscriptions, which is important to the business.


The New York Times has a big global market, reaching 2 million international digital subscribers as of June 2024. Does the company implement different strategies to target subscribers in the United States and its international subscribers, and are there any notable trends for those in Korea?

There's different willingness to pay in different regions, and the markets are very different in terms of people. Paying for quality news isn't something that's given, and I'm seeing that here in Korea, it's definitely in the beginning stages. Then you go to Europe, it is much stronger. So our pricing has to reflect behavior.

We don't really do things a lot differently for different regions. We have a very sophisticated data science system that allows personalization in areas we feel are appropriate. We are a destination for news, where we are more of an authority that tells people what they should know. But then, we have been experimenting with, and expanding the spaces in which we can be more personalized in our approach. Those personalized spaces are based on your behavior, such as what you engaged in the past, how often you come, what regions you come from. That could reflect the country the person is from. However, a person in Korea may have something more in common with someone in France if they share the same profession or because they're both moms, and it's less about having a geo-specific way of trying to get people to better engage with us.

BY LEE TAE-HEE [lee.taehee2@joongang.co.kr]