Subscription insights from New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger

The New York Times is regularly cited as one of subscription publishing’s success stories, and for good reason: It’s amassed nearly 10 million digital-only subscribers which generated over $1 billion in revenue in 2023.

The company’s publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, provided some valuable insights into how NYT is thinking about the subscription model in a wide-ranging interview with The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. They included:

Thinking bigger with subscriptions

Some industry observers have argued in recent years that news publishers have reached “peak subscription”, or that a “great subscription reversal” is underway because a handful have struggled to make the model work. According to Sulzberger, those assessments are thinking far too small.