The New York Times Company

The New York Times had an exceptional 2025 by almost any measure. Total revenues reached $2.82 billion, up 9.2% on 2024, and operating profit jumped 22.9% to $431.6 million. The company ended the year with 12.78 million total subscribers, more than at any point in its 175-year history, after adding 1.4 million net new digital subscribers during the year. Diluted earnings per share rose to $2.09 from $1.77. The company held approximately $1.2 billion in cash and marketable securities and carried no debt. By the numbers, this is a company that has successfully navigated the digital transition that has undone so many of its peers.

The New York Times Company is a New York-based public company, listed on the NYSE, and controlled through a dual-class share structure by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, who have owned The Times since 1896. The company employs approximately 6,000 full-time equivalent staff, of whom more than 3,000 work in journalism. Its journalism operation, The New York Times itself, remains its core product, but the company has built an expanding portfolio of digital products around it: The Athletic (sports journalism), Cooking, Games (including Wordle and Connections), Audio, and Wirecutter (product reviews). These sit alongside the newspaper under what the company calls a “bundle” subscription, which has become the primary engine of its subscriber growth.

The New York Times Company: key financial and audience indicators 2024–2025

Source: The New York Times Company 2025 Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Signals

The bundle is working, and it’s remaking the economics of the company

The strategic bet The Times made several years ago, that it could build a portfolio of digital products compelling enough for people to pay a combined subscription for all of them, is paying off in ways that are now visible in the financial results. Bundle and multiproduct subscribers grew by about 1.17 million during 2025 to reach 6.48 million, a 24.3% increase in a single year. These subscribers pay more: bundle ARPU (average revenue per user) was $12.67 per 28-day billing cycle, compared with $3.47 for single-product subscribers like Games-only or Cooking-only. The financial logic is clear: getting a subscriber into the full bundle nearly quadruples the revenue per head compared to selling them one standalone product.

The consequence of this is that total digital-only subscription revenue grew 14.3% to $1.43 billion, a figure that would have seemed implausible a decade ago for a single newspaper company. It is now larger than The Times’s total advertising revenue from both print and digital combined. For the first time in the modern history of American newspaper economics, a major title is genuinely and structurally subscription-first.

The journalism operation is growing, not shrinking

At a time when most news organisations are cutting editorial staff, The Times is hiring them. Journalism costs within the cost of revenue line rose $48.7 million in 2025, driven primarily by more journalists in its newsrooms and higher salaries. The company reported from more than 150 countries and every US state. It employs more than 3,000 people in journalism operations, roughly half its total workforce. This is a significant and unusual fact in the current media environment: the newsroom is expanding because the business model that funds it is working.

This does not mean The Times is without cost pressures or editorial tensions (guild contract negotiations, questions about AI use in the newsroom, and debates about political coverage have all featured in the past year) but the direction of travel in terms of journalism resources is the opposite of what is happening at most comparable organisations around the world.

The Athletic is finding its place

The Athletic, the sports journalism subscription service The Times acquired in 2022 for around $550 million, was the company’s most expensive and controversial bet of recent years. It has had a complicated integration, with significant losses in its early years inside the company. By 2025 it is part of the bundle offering and contributing to multiproduct subscriber growth, though The Times does not break out Athletic-specific financials separately any longer, having moved to single-segment reporting in the third quarter of 2025. The consolidation of reporting segments makes it harder to assess whether The Athletic has become profitable on its own terms, but its inclusion in the bundle, alongside Cooking, Games and news, appears to be helping drive the subscriber growth that the overall numbers reflect.

Print is managed decline, not crisis

Print remains a significant business: print subscription revenue was $516.4 million in 2025 and print advertising was $155.4 million, together accounting for nearly a quarter of total revenue. But both are declining: print subscriptions down 3.2%, print advertising down 5.4%; and the company is clear that it does not expect these trends to reverse. Home-delivery print subscribers fell by around 40,000 during the year to approximately 570,000. The Times’s response has been to use print price increases to slow the revenue decline while allowing volume to fall, and to manage printing and distribution costs accordingly. The print operation is being wound down gradually and profitably rather than abandoned abruptly.

The AI lawsuits are the most significant unresolved business risk

The Times filed suit against Microsoft and OpenAI in December 2023 for copyright infringement, alleging that its journalism was used without authorisation to train large language models. In December 2025, it added a further lawsuit against Perplexity AI on similar grounds. These cases are proceeding through the US courts and The Times is treating them seriously: it spent $13.3 million on generative AI litigation costs in 2025, up from $10.8 million in 2024, and reports these costs separately as a special item. The outcome of these cases matters beyond The Times itself as they will shape how AI companies are permitted to use published journalism, and what, if any, compensation flows back to the news organisations whose work formed the training data. The Times is the most prominent and best-resourced news organisation fighting this battle, which makes its litigation both a commercial matter and something close to a sector-wide public interest case.

Scale and quality are reinforcing each other

What makes The Times’s position unusual among legacy news organisations is that its journalism is clearly driving its subscriber growth rather than being subsidised by non-journalism businesses. The company’s shareholder letter describes a “virtuous cycle”: journalism attracts subscribers, subscribers fund journalism, better journalism attracts more subscribers. The numbers support this. Digital advertising also grew strongly, up 20% to $410.6 million, partly because a large and engaged subscriber base is attractive to advertisers even in an era when programmatic advertising dominates. More than 12 million paying subscribers, each opening the app multiple times a day, is an advertising audience that commands real premiums.

This is a genuinely different situation from most news organisations, including some well-regarded ones, which are cutting costs to stay solvent or relying on philanthropy to fund their public interest journalism. The Times is profitable, investing in its newsroom, and growing. That does not make it without flaws or immune to the pressures facing the broader media industry, but it does make it the clearest current example of a large-scale journalism organisation that has built a digital business model that works.