2020 was a bad year for many news organisations — particularly local print newspapers that had to contest with all the restrictions of COVID, on top of the existential threat of social media, where more than half of us now reportedly get our news.
The only organisations that seemed to thrive in that environment were the big ones. Indeed, the biggest of them all, The New York Times, had a very good year. The NYT added more than 2.3 million digital-only subscribers — taking the company's total subscriptions to more than 7.5 million. 2020 was also the first year that the NYTimes made more revenue from digital subscriptions than print for the first time in its history.
Slow and steady wins the race
For the NYTimes the transition to digital has been slow, but nonetheless impressive. The journey technically began 25 years ago when the company launched the nytimes.com website. Since then there have really been two transitions happening at the same time. One is from advertising to subscription, and the other has been from print to digital.
The "not-news" bit
The small blue-green bar at the top of this chart is particularly interesting. It represents the NYTimes revenue from digital products that aren't news — think games, cooking and audio. That segment has grown particularly quickly; $9m of revenue in 2016 turned into $14m, then $22m then $34m and finally $54m last year. If that division was a hot Silicon Valley start-up it would probably be thinking about an IPO soon.
