The New York Times Company (NYT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm John Hodulik, the media and telecom analyst here at UBS. And I'm very pleased to announce our next guest is Meredith Kopit Levien, the President and CEO of The New York Times Company. Meredith, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me, and big props for saying my name correctly, both of them, Kopit and Levien. Well done.

All right. Thank you. Took some practice, but no worries. I -- so we've got about 45 minutes for Q&A, and I've got a list here. But anybody that has questions from the audience, please feel free to enter them into the application, and I'll read them come into the conversation. So let's dive right in.

The New York Times has seen some good subscription growth in the last few years. How much would you say has been the result of those sort of general news environment versus some of the initiatives that The New York Times has taken to drive growth?

Yes. That's a popular question. Let me start by saying that the news cycle always plays a role. We're in the news business, so it's certainly playing -- continuing to play a role. But I would say even with the big fluctuations, we've seen -- I mean, obviously, last year was a historic news year with like 3 giant kind of -- just giant stories with the election and once in 50 years civil rights movement. And obviously, the story -- a very scary story of a global pandemic. But even -- within those fluctuations, it's fair to say that we're living in a heightened news environment generally, and I don't think that goes away. But I think what you're really asking me is how much of the growth is that, this sort of heightened news cycle versus us being able to simulate it, and I'll say we are getting better and better with every passing quarter and year at putting more levers into our own control. So we're getting better at stimulating the growth. And I'll say, we're getting better in sort of 2 parts to that. We're generally getting better at how we engage people around news and our other content. And there, we're really focused on getting people to come to us for needs we didn't need before or didn't meet really well before, just getting them to come back regularly. So as an example, we've got more live and breaking and developing news products today than we had before, and those really get people to come back intraday and intra-week, and we've made it easier to follow ongoing stories. And I'll just say because of that work and some other things we're doing around engagement, a slow news day this year is still, in many, many cases, higher from an audience and engagement standpoint and a really high news day in 2019. So I think, in general, in engagement, we're pulling levers well and still have a lot, lot more to pull. On the conversion side, on the customer journey and access model, 2 years ago, we launched a registration model. For the first time, we had to register to read more than a small number of stories on The Times, and that had the effect of making what is now more than 100 million registered users addressable to us that have sort of opened up a whole new round of addressability. And with that, we're now in sort of much more regular newsletter contact with our audience and just have many more ways to stimulate them to come back through that. As an example, we've got this giant hit of a morning newsletter. It's called The Morning, and almost 6 million people open it and read it every day, and many of those people then drop into our funnel, and it's been a steady source of subscriptions. And the last thing I'll say, that's all sort of top of funnel, middle funnel I've just described. On conversion, we used to have a 20 -- we started out with a 20 vertical meter, then we chopped it at some point on the journey to a 10 vertical meter. And then we would sort of shrink that given -- depending on where we want in the quarter. And now over the last couple of years, we've gotten much more sophisticated at applying algorithms and then machine learning to sort of dynamically deciding when to ask someone to subscribe, and we do that based on their engagement behaviors, and that has just unlocked a whole new world of conversion optimization. Still a lot of running room there. Those models just get better and better. So that's a long-winded answer, but we've got a lot of levers in our hands now and still more to go.

Got you. No, that's great answer. So new products and sort of using some of the learnings to just be smarter about the data you're getting and around user acquisition. So we've seen some real volatility in the net adds, I would say, over the last 2 quarters. I think third quarter, particularly was sort of 3x what we had seen previous quarter. Can you talk about what sort of drove that change and what investors should sort of expect going forward?

Yes. Let me -- I'll answer what drove the change, but let me take a step back and just say we're incredibly focused on the long-term opportunity. We have a very big long-term opportunity. We encourage our investors to really listen to what we say about that long-term opportunity and track our progress on that, and I'll talk about how they should do that in a moment. And I wouldn't make too much of any 1 quarter because of all the volatility. And that volatility can come for any number of reasons. If you read the news cycle, so we just talked about it. It can be exogenous things in the world. We had a relatively slow second quarter. Thank goodness, parts of the world open back up, and we had vaccines available. And to your question, we had a really strong third quarter because we had a lot of work on our road map that happened to land in engagement and conversion optimizations in the quarter, much of which really, really succeeded. So for any number of reasons, there can be a lot of noise from 1 quarter to the next, and I wouldn't make too much of that fluctuation. We don't guide to net adds quarterly for that reason. But that said, I do think there's a lot for investors to pay attention to. We've talked about a TAM of at least 100 million people half -- last half internationally who we think will pay for news and, I think investors can ask themselves and us is that TAM forming as we said it would. We think we've got lots of evidence that it is, including like the 100 million -- we have 100-plus million registered users now. I think they should look at and hold us accountable to should we keep growing our net adds strongly sort of year-on-year. I'd say the -- in the first 3 quarters of this year, even after last year's historic growth with 900,000 net subscription additions. So that's a really good signal, are we penetrating the market as we said we would. The last time we put out a public target, we said 10 million subscriptions by 2025. It's 2021. We're at 8 million and change, so well on our way to that. And I guess, last, to the unit economics of our digital subscription business suggests that we can build a larger and more profitable business over time. And I think there are many, many pieces of evidence into that. So I'll leave it there. But to me, less quarter-to-quarter, more year-on-year, and are we doing the things we said we're going to do.

Got it. Maybe -- don't want to harp too much on the subs. But next year, you go into sort of midterm elections. So think of it from -- certainly from an advertising standpoint, it's a political year. Does that typically drive -- is there some sort of seasonality around the sort of political calendar to suggest that there's enough of a sort of tailwind that next year, probably shaping up to be a good year versus this year?

Yes. I mean, I'd say even harp away on subs. It's definitely the main idea of the business. Let me say, broadly, goes to the point I made earlier that we're kind of living at a time of heightened news. I don't think the world is getting any less complex or interesting, so I think there are any number of stories that could be big in the coming year. Certainly, just to your question about elections, we tend to see heightened audience and interest around elections in almost any scenario. I can't think of a time where we didn't, and we have a particularly rich set of tools around elections to help people kind of understand and navigate everything there is to know about the candidates, the races. And we do that -- the issues at hand, we do that at varying levels of detail. And I'll use it as a way to say one of the things that I think The Times is kind of differentially good at is data journalism and using often publicly available data, sometimes data we collect ourselves, but to help people interpret what's going on. And we are especially -- we're not only good at that at elections. We've been very good at that COVID, too, and a number of other stories, but we are especially good at that around elections, and we've put a lot of time and care into planning for that.

Got you. Can you talk a little bit about -- so you've mentioned a huge opportunity at TAM, 100 million potential subscribers. You're now at your -- you're now at 8 million, going to 10 million by 2025. What are you -- can you talk about some of the investments that you're making now to realize that to sort of fully execute on what looks like a good opportunity?

Yes, yes. At the highest level, we're continuing to invest in our journalism to make sure we can cover kind of the range of human experience and do that in a way that's relevant to English speakers globally, and we're investing in our digital product and tech to make sure that our audience can kind of get to all the value that's there and experience and understand it. If I were to be a little more specific about that, I would say, in the journalism, we are investing into the breadth. So we add journalists. By the way, a little goes a long way here. We add talented journals every year. The Times continues to be a place that top journalists want to come work. And unlike in the entertainment business, you can sort of add 1 or 2 -- again, you have a relatively small number of people on a domain or a topic and get quite a bit of value for that. Also, in journalism, we're investing to meet news feeds that we've not tended in the past to be really robust in meeting. I mentioned live breaking and developing news before that tended to be -- tended to come to The Times for the polished story. When something has happened, maybe go to Twitter or television while it's actually unfolding, and we're getting better and better at having the means of capturing the audience when it's actually happening. So we're investing in journalism itself, in top talent and to meet more news feeds. We're also investing to meet more life news. We can help you decide what to cook for dinner and to work or entertain yourself with our Spelling Bee and to give you good shopping advice with Wirecutter. And I'd say, lastly, we're investing in lots of new formats to make sure people can get to our value, get to our quality journalism, our adjacent content in whatever way makes the most sense for them. Audio has been one of the areas where you've sort of seen the fruits of that investment of late the most. And I'll just say, lastly, I think we're just at the beginning of articulating kind of the broader promise of all that together in a bundle and having an array of value to help people sort of meet news needs and broader life needs as a very compelling proposition at scale to people globally.

Got it. So as you sort of look at these initiatives and allocate capital against them, how do you sort of evaluate the -- sort of the returns that will drive? And how should we, as investors, sort of judge and hold management accountable for sort of the outcomes and then really the growth that we should expect to see?

Yes. It's a great question. I mean, I'll just say at the highest level, we're endeavoring to build a larger and more profitable business. And I've said some of the ways investors should hold us accountable with -- like is the TAM forming? Are we penetrating it? Do we have enough -- are we adding to the value that would say you can penetrate it more? Are we growing at a sufficient rate to achieve what we've said publicly we do? I think we have very good answers to all of that. And I would also say so much of the investment we have put in so far has been about getting to that 10 million, getting to what we put out as a public target. But our -- as I said before, our answer on the TAM and our ability to penetrate it and what we can be and do in people's lives, we're only getting more optimistic about how we answer those questions. We're only getting more ambitious. So as we continue to invest, that is very much about getting well past 10 million, and I think investors can begin to think about that. I would also say, can you imagine many more people subscribing to the broad value proposition? And can you imagine us continuing to show the pricing power we have across that value proposition as it grows?

You talked a little bit about some of the sort of spending initiatives to drive growth. Can you talk a little bit about maybe the operating leverage in the business? So I guess, first, when does this business start to really show the operating leverage?

Yes, yes. It's a good question. I'll say we are already beginning to see some natural leverage in the model as subscriptions grow. It's not always easy to see it because of our legacy business. So the business is basically comprised of 3 kind of primary things. We've got a large and growing digital subscription business with favorable unit economics, and I've just described to you in any number of ways that we're going to keep growing that, and we believe we're going to keep growing that and continue to drive favorable unit economics. We have a profitable and very cash-generative print product, which produces a drag every year on our overall economics. So that's some of the noise in the system that makes the natural leverage harder to see. And then I'll say, we also have a high margin but volatile because the market it plays in, ad. We can talk more about the ad business as we see fit. We certainly like it more today than we did a few years ago, but it's in a market where things tend to happen. Swings can happen in demand in that market pretty quickly. So that's how I would think about it. But just in terms of the natural leverage that I mentioned and how it begins to show through, we've lost something in the order of $100 million in high-margin print revenue or less 3 or 4 years and have higher overall profits than we did then. So that's the subscription model and natural leverage [ doing it for ].

Got you. And the third quarter, I think marketing spend was the sort of highest I think you've ever reported. I mean, how do you think about additional spending there? And maybe talk about your cost to acquire a subscriber, how the trend has been there.

Yes. Well, let me back up and just say a couple of things first. Whatever we spend on marketing, a little or a lot, the vast majority of our starts come to us through organic meetings. So that's like the first and most important thing to know, and that is because we have a very regular audience of many, many more people every week than we have subscribers. So we -- the model, the product itself, which is the journalism and the software through which people find an experience that's naturally generating audience, and we can point that news audience to a growing set of products. So we don't have to market -- we don't have to do paid marketing to grow. That's really important to know. I'd say for the starts that do come through paid media, and you asked specifically about the third quarter, we are disciplined in how we approach it. We're -- we govern our direct acquisition spend on an internal rate of return, and we only spend if we believe we can do so profitably. To the extent you're getting at like what happens from here, I will say that I have said for a long time that you invest into the opportunity and the journalism and the product and the marketing that you don't have to keep investing n the marketing at the same rate as the product itself. So the combination of the first 2 things get better and better at doing the work, and we are reaching that point. I think we're reaching a point where, over time, we can rely less on marketing. And specifically, we're seeing the model get better. So we're confident that the marketing spend, we believe it can be contained.

Got you. So given that and given sort of where you are from a technology spend standpoint and maybe as part of the sort of advertising recovery and the fact that you have this political year next year, I mean, do you feel you're in a position where you can see sort of sustainably higher margins and greater leverage each year as we look further out?

What I'll say is, again, just to repeat something I stated earlier, ultimately, we're endeavoring to build a larger and more profitable business. We are incredibly focused now on volume and on revenue and sort of growing, taking advantage of this opportunity we do have and investing into that. We think, ultimately, that's the best way we can return to shareholders the value they expect. And I would say, as we do that and as you think about just the model that I described to you before with the subscription model that is large and growing and has strong unit economics, you can see how you get to more leverage in the business. We are careful to say that, well, we don't think we have to keep investing in marketing in the way that we have. We don't want to foreclose the long-term opportunity in journalism in with the product in favor of dropping more money to the bottom line. But I do think, ultimately, we are getting to a place where we can envision a larger and more profitable business that we're doing.

Got you. So Games and Cooking, standalone products, each have about 1 million subscriptions at the end of the third quarter. So how do they fit into the mix? And can you talk about the TAM there and where those businesses can go?

Yes. I would say we're really excited about both of those businesses. I would have said that 4 or 5 years ago, and we're still just as excited. They're both in markets that I think present a robust opportunity, recipes and puzzles, games like the ones that we make. So we -- I think they both have a lot of running room. I'll say as they hit 1 million subscriptions, they've set a higher bar for what else we might do as a standalone product. And they each have -- they each, I think, help us widen the TAM somewhat. They each play in their own markets. I don't think that's completely additive to the 100 million TAM we talk about and think about for news, but I think it's somewhat additive and some overlap. But -- so I think they help us widen the TAM. They also help us penetrate that TAM. I think that the broad idea of a bundle of New York Times products that can help you address multiple areas of need in your life, we think, is a very, very compelling idea. And I'll say, we know that the subscribers we have now that buy more than one product from a [ tender ] routine that are right. You see that at [ causal ], but we know that, that is a behavior that correlates. And that, we think, holds a lot of promise about what many more reasons to engage people in their lives could do for the model overall.

And maybe some other standalone products, Wirecutter recently launched. You also have [ audio kids ]. I mean -- are these just -- I mean, just -- again, how does the -- how do they fit with games and cooking? And just how do you think of the growth opportunities in these categories?

Yes. So I'd say very broadly, that is we want to be more to more people. Important to say news is today and as far as I can see will remain the main idea to our best source of audience and daily value and engagement. And I've just given you a bunch of reasons why I think that's going to be the case for a long time to come, but it's also an incredible source of kind of pointing attention and audience to these other products. It's almost like it's The Times is -- I think I've said this before publicly. If it's a solar system, news is like the sun. And we've got these orbiting planets that draw life from the fact that we've got this daily thing that many, many people come to, looking for understanding, and we have an opportunity to offer them other gains. So as I said, at the businesses, we already have our products where we have Cooking, Games, very optimistic that there's still lots of running room. Early days of Wirecutter. We're super excited about what we're seeing. Just to the point I made before about a bundle. One of the really interesting and we think positive things is a lot of the subscribers are current. They were trying who want to add it to their subscription. That's been great to see. And then our best in kids and audio that we've talked about, I'd say, are earlier forays to see is there something direct we can build here that could have value in a subscription bundle or sometimes the answer is that has indirect value as part of our funnel and part of the way that we bring audience to The Times or just add value to the subscribers we already have.

Got you. Is -- before we move on to subscription, is ARPU lever here to drive subs? Or is the ARPU growth sort of locked in from here?

Say what you -- ask -- say what you mean by that.

Or do you expect sort of more -- whether -- sort of thinking about your bundling opportunities. I mean, that's certainly what we've seen in the other DTC spaces like Disney, for instance, you're getting a lot of leverage off of putting these products together, lower churn. They give a bit of a discount. So thinking through that, I mean, do you feel like you may have to give up some ARPU to get some subs or...

Yes. Let me tell you what we've seen so far, again, in the context of the promise of a broader bundle. In news, I guess 3 or 4 years ago, we started to lead with promotional pricing much more aggressively than we have done in the past and then move through a cycle of -- once those people get to a year, can you actually get them to take a full price or an interim price? We are now like 3 or 4 years into that, that has gone. So mainly, we're very pleased with that. So we think we've got the sort of flywheel right of getting people to buy at a relatively low price and getting them to engage, find value, pay more. No reason to believe that, that won't hold up across products. We actually just did the first sale on Cooking that we've had since we launched Cooking, I think, 4 or 5 years ago. Paid product, super excited about that. We have been testing -- I talked about this in recent earnings calls, we've been testing different price points for the multiproduct bundle, testing it as an add-on and then bundle sell them. In fact, one of the areas we have not been super sort of focused on or rationally priced in was the All Digital Access bundle, which included everything, having irrational price for a long time. And so we are testing different price points for that now, and we think there's a lot of room to do a version of what you said, which is to bring people in based on their interest in the bundle and then get them to engage over a longer time horizon and ultimately pay more. So far, everything we know has told us we can do that.

Yes. And I was just saying how granular are your -- is your approach or your systems where like you can look at the engagement you're seeing from a subscriber and where it's very strong be more aggressive in terms of raising prices or do it sooner than you would otherwise versus sort of being...

Yes. I'll tell you 2 ways. I mean, that's a great point. One of them I mentioned a little bit earlier, but let me talk about it in the context of price, too. We have gotten much better in the last few years, and you just kind of get steadily better once you're good at it at, at applying machine learning to figure out when to ask somebody to pay, right? So there, it's less price, and it's more not too soon or they may go away and never pay, not too late or they may not think they have to pay. And we've gotten very, very good at reading engagement signals to sort of pick the right moment to ask them to pay. By the same token, similar work, we've gotten much better at applying machine learning to deciding where someone at the 1-year point should go in terms of price. Should they go to an interim price? Or can they go all the way to full price? And that's based on engagement signals. And early on, we did that in a randomized way. We train models. And now we're much positive for how to think about revenue retention because the models tell us who can go up and who may need an interim price or double a little longer and another price.

I see. So I think we've spent a lot of time on the subscription business. Maybe talk about how advertising fits into the story and just sort of maybe the investments or initiatives or just how aggressively you're approaching that effort?

Yes. I came to The Times a little more than 8 years ago to run the ad business. And I'll say, we like our ad business a lot more today. We're sort of more optimistic about based on everything we've seen so far about the ad business. We like its kind of overall character better in terms of meeting demand in a differentiated way. The best thing about the ad business that we have today is that it runs on the same high-octane gas that the subscription business runs on, and that is deeply engaged registered users whose data -- we have a lot of signal from -- to be able to share data and privacy forward ways with marketers to better target their advertising. We've been probably 2 years, 2.5 years in building up a first-party data product set. We have a lot of signal, and we're a publisher with -- even as a paid site, we're a publisher with a very large audience, very large audience, so good reach and lots of signal and a wide breadth of content. So there's quite a bit that we know about our readers. And I'd say, a big part of the growth that we're seeing in our digital ad business is coming from demand to the first-party data products. And the great thing of those products is you know do they work or not based on 2 campaigns, renewing, do they buy more of them. So we're super excited about that. And I would say that, to me, feels like a gift that we expect to keep giving because we'll continue to get better signals and better with the data set. But we're nearly entirely off of third-party data from -- so that feels like it can be a real proprietary advantage and a very competitive proposition. We also like our ad business because we've got a small number of larger canvas ads. We launched a display ad product set probably 5 or 6 years ago called the Flex suite, which were meant to be kind of native-looking canvases that a marketer could do more in, and the site doesn't have a ton -- better canvas ads. They tend to perform really well. You add that to first-party data. And in the space we play in versus, say, other premium publishers or content companies, that's -- it's a proposition that has really worked so far, and we're excited about its prospects. And then I'll just say the Audio business, it's a lot of the demand for high-quality audio, and Times is a very big, daily show with huge audience which is great from an ad standpoint. And we've also launched a number of other shows that get sponsored very quickly because if the shows are great and differentiated, then there's a lot of demand.

And again, do you guys benefit -- again, I'm not as familiar with the function business, but do you guys benefit from the -- again, from the little gold calendar as well from an advertising standpoint? I mean, is that more of a driver as we look into '22 versus '21?

I would say anything that drives engagement is -- that's my kind of high-octane gas point that subs and ads from a -- I'll say something else I think we benefit from. There's been a lot of talk in the market about kind of supply chain pressure. And I've talked and our CFO has talked a lot about just what it means to be a publisher, premium publisher with great products in a market dominated by platform scale and that has felt hard at points. I'll say something that, at the moment is going to feel less hard because our business, we play in many, many categories, and we've got this very compelling proposition that I just described to you as have worked really well. And the fact that we tend to be an upper funnel business, so marketers buy us for brand, for big partnerships, not sort of at the bottom of the funnel, not necessarily to drive retail. We have, thus far, been -- feels like much less effective than others have described by the supply chain pressures, and I would say that we're optimistic. We don't see any reason why that may not continue where we are less affected there. We'll see.

Okay. So how should we think about the print business? The subscription part of the business is the only one I'd say -- however, the advertising seems to be more decline. So what's in store for sort of print business in your mind for the medium term?

Yes, yes. Let me -- you got to think about the print business in sort of 2 ways. It's really 2 different -- the product has 2 different businesses, very high-margin, cash-generative ad business that has come down a lot from the time that I've been at The Times. I want to say 2 important things. One, I don't believe goes to 0 as long as there's a paper; and two, and related, I don't believe it goes to 0 because I actually don't think -- I came up through the ad business. There's something the national newspaper the quality of The New York Times does for a marketer that has yet to be replaced in digital or by another medium, and we've really seen that. I mean, some of our biggest advertisers in the newspaper now are companies totally borne of the digital age. And they buy us because they want to signify an important moment in the world or a product launch. They've got an important message. And I don't think that need goes away. So I think that's a really, really aspect of how to think -- how investors, in particular, should think about our print ad business, almost has like some of the characters like outdoor or aspects of TV, but there is something -- limited spot, and that's sort of a very particular purpose for a marketer, and we're seeing that. I'm not going to pretend it isn't a business in secular decline. And in periods where demand really slows down, the legacy stuff gets hit worse. And print, obviously, got hit worse in 2020 when the character of demand really changed. On the consumer side, we have an unbelievably loyal base of people who buy the paper and pay a lot of money for it and have taken price increases for a number of years now as it gets increasingly complicated to get the paper to them. We do control some aspects, not all of it, but some aspects of the supply chain, and we think we still have a pretty manageable product. We want to be reminded of that by a Sunday paper. And we don't think the character of the declines there. That revenue line has been incredibly stable for a long time. Even as -- at some point, it will begin to come down a bit. We don't think that looks like the ad declines look. We think that happens -- we believe that will happen in a more gradual way. But right now, that's pretty stable. So far, it's been remarkably stable in context.

Great. You recently had a new CTO, Jason Sobel. Can you talk a little bit about his priorities and maybe what some of the progress he' made since he started?

Yes. Well, so we hired Jason, gosh, it's been a long CTO search, long, careful, slow CTO search, and I want to say he started in August, so whatever, that makes him like 4 or 5 months on the job. And we were particularly looking for somebody who -- a technologist with a very strong mission orientation. We wanted to sort of -- and a very strong consumer orientation and understood that the thing we were trying to do was to get this digital subscription business to a real scale, and he certainly came with that orientation. And particularly, he came with it in the back-end work and infrastructure work. He had been the head of -- I may say it wrong, but something like trust and safety at Airbnb. And then he also had run a piece of, if not all, infrastructure there, and he was there for 5.5 years, so we'd seen sort of back-end work, platform work, infrastructure work at platform scale, had a very big role in it. And he had also spent half a dozen of years of Facebook in platform and infrastructure work in early days, and we were really looking for that. Because when we make our investments into tech, what we are really ultimately investing into is the idea of leverage to come because when the conditions to code get better and the talent you can attract and retain is able to do their best work, ultimately, you can deploy engineers more efficiently across many places at once. So that was the focus of this hiring, and that's what he's incredibly focused on.

And does it -- does that signal -- I think in the past, you said you haven't been able to hire on the tech side as aggressively. I mean, does -- I guess, hopefully, some of the issues around COVID start to recede, you've got a new guy in place to run that effort. Does that sort of mean sort of larger investments in the technology side as we look out to '22?

Yes. I think we've already talked about and sort of priced in and what we've described what the tech investment looks like. I do think it's -- we play in the same competitive market through digital product development talent. Everybody plays in, and that talent is getting more expensive and harder to get in economic terms. But based on what I've just described to you, a, we think we've got a very compelling proposition because the work is really interesting at the time. You're touching and millions of consumers on a regular basis, and the mission is very, very compelling to many people. And even if the talent or person by person in certain places where it's really hard to hire gets a little more expensive, we get more efficient over time at deploying it, and there is leverage to come in that work. That's actually why you do the back end and the infrastructure work, and we're well into that kind of work now. It's a little bit like I described before, marketing spend. It doesn't keep growing forever. We're reaching a point now where you really begin to contain it because the product and tech and journalism of doing so much more of the work less and we -- earlier about ROI and through leverage in the model, we're thinking about tech in the same way that, ultimately, when you build well on the back end and in platforms, that makes you more efficient over time and everything.

Great. So I have time for one more question. I remember I think you've been at the company since 2013. So can you talk about what you think are the most meaningful changes in the 8 years that you've been at New York Times? And then maybe if you could look out to the next 8 years, what do you think will be the most meaningful changes based -- from where the company is now to what it looks like 8 from now?

Yes. I mean, there are so many ways I can answer that question. Let me try and give you a short answer and say I think we are a lot more ambitious today. I joined the company in 2013. We are a lot more ambitious today than we were in 2013 about how we can penetrate this market, how many people, what role we might play in their lives with news at the center but beyond that as well. And even within news, we're very optimistic about how big we can be. So we just feel the place runs on a much greater sense of opportunity and ambition. It's a lot of the fun to work here now. We've also seen the enormity of the impact of quality, independent, original journalism in people's lives. I think the 2020 global pandemic was such a scary and terribly sad and kind of stunning representation of what quality journalism can do in people's lives at scale to help people make sense of something really difficult going on. And so I would say opportunity and the ambition and if you would -- I don't know if you said in the next 8 years or 10 years, I would say, I think The New York Times, I believe, we're going to mean more to more people, both within news. So we're going to -- a little more of the news diet for a larger group of people and beyond news in their lives, and that's going to mean a larger and more ambitious business that is increasing in its cash flow and profit.

Great. Well, Meredith, I think that's all we have time. This is a great conversation, and we appreciate your time today.

Okay. Lots of fun. Thanks so much.

Okay. Thanks for being here. Thank you, everyone.