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

So thank you all for joining us. I'm John Hodulik, the telecom and media analyst here, and I'm very pleased to announce our next speaker is Meredith Kopit Levien, the President and CEO of The New York Times. Meredith, thanks.

Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yes. Absolutely. Thanks for joining us again this year. As we always do, first of all, we've got 35 minutes for Q&A, and I've got a number of questions to go through. But if anybody has questions in the audience, please use the app and they'll hit the iPad here, and I'll filter them through the conversation. So Meredith, what we always do here, end of year. It's been a great year for New York Times. The stock has done very well. The results have been great. Maybe we could start by framing for the audience your priorities for the company as we look out to 2026.

Yes, I'm happy to do that. And we were just chatting about last week's awesome deal book conference. If you were there, this almost goes without saying, but you would have just like felt so intensely how much dynamism there is in media and in tech. And I just think the first thing to say is the thing we do at our core high-quality independent journalism has like never been more important given all of that dynamism. And our essential subscription strategy really continues to work like precisely as designed through that dynamism. So our pursuit of being the world's best news destination, the fact that we now have multiple market-leading lifestyle products, and we've put it all together in this interconnected product experience and bundle is making The Times relevant in the daily lives of tens of millions of people. So it's all really working. In terms of our priorities for that strategy going into the new year, they're going to look a lot like what our priorities were this year. The first one is just to continue to cover the world's most important stories ambitiously and with the best journalistic talent there is. Secondly, to do that in like every conceivable format that people want to take it in and especially video. The third one is to keep adding value in every part of our product portfolio. And if you look back at 2025, like literally in every dimension, news, sports games, recipes, shopping, we added multiple new things, multiple ways for the consumer to experience that value. And sort of all 3 of those priorities add up to the fourth one, which is to get many more people to come to The Times directly and daily have a direct relationship with us. So you're going to see us continue to be very focused on those things in 2026.

Great. And I think we'll touch on a lot of those topics. Maybe we'll start with driving customers or people to the service. You're at nearly 12 million digital subscribers heading into the year. Year-end goal was 15 million by middle '27.

Milestone not an end state, yes.

Exactly. Exactly. Milestone. The question we get a lot is how big is the addressable market for The New York Times? And sort of what can you do to sort of expand that TAM?

Yes. We have a lot of confidence that the TAM is at least as big as we've publicly said, and that confidence comes from a lot of market signal. We've got 150 million registrations with The Times broadly and growing. We have 50 million to 100 million people who are using our sites and our apps every day. Many millions who come to The Times every single day, all to say, if anything, I think we're underpenetrated in the addressable market. And I said earlier, I'll say again, at the core of that is really high-quality independent journalism, our news report, which is today more broad and more deep than it has ever been with more journalists sort of covering more things from more places, and we're making that accessible in so many more formats. And that's part of how we widen the engaged audience for our work. It's a really important part of it. But it's also worth saying for -- and I know a lot of you in the room, I think most of you know this well, but for anybody who thinks of us as kind of primarily a news report, I would say we now also have the world's largest sports journalism newsroom with just 60 people who cover the NFL alone. And obviously, we're covering every major sport. That goes a long way to our potential to widen the audience. We have tens of millions of recipes and are developing new ones every year. We have games that literally tens of millions of people play every single day. Our shopping website, Wirecutter drove like $1 billion of commerce last year. We keep opening up new categories of coverage. I could go on and on in that. I'll say geographically, we've already widened the audience. The fastest-growing audience for the enterprise now in the United States is in the South and in the Midwest. So really widening beyond the coast. We have a huge international opportunity that we're just at the beginning of getting at. I know we're going to talk about video and young people, but I have a lot of confidence there. And the last thing I'll say for anybody who believes that The Times news report or broadly defined is for kind of one political group or people who identify with one little group or another, I'll say, one of our fastest-growing shows, it's a video podcast is a conservative show, opinion show hosted by Ross Douthat called Interesting Times, and I encourage everybody to listen to it. He's basically exploring all the big ideas on the new right, and it has a huge audience and is very, very ascendant at The Times.

That's great. Family plans are also a relatively new development.

New and awesome.

Okay. Well, let's hear how awesome. How did the uptake then -- and can family plans be a meaningful driver of the 1 million-plus subs you need to hit that 2027 milestone?

Yes. I want to just start by saying we have a lot of drivers, a lot of levers in the model. We have a lot of confidence in family plan, but it is just one of multiple levers in the model. I hope we get to talk about more of them. But we really like what we see on family plan so far. It's early but it feels like it's really working. It was certainly a major contributor in the last quarter. And here's why we like family plan so much. I mean fundamentally, The New York Times has always been set up to be this great shared experience, even if you go back to thinking about the Sunday paper and passing the different sections around. But it's really good for market penetration, one. It's additive to revenue because if you buy a family plan, you're already or you upgrade to a family plan, you're paying more. And it's great for engagement, and that is ultimately great for retention. And the way I think about it is we've been on this kind of progressive journey with engagement and retention. When we were predominantly a news product a decade ago, we used to -- we had this big insight that we were really focused on, which was if we could get you to read across one more topic, you were more likely to pay, stay, pay more over time. And then as we added products to the bundle, it was like if we could get you to engage with one more product, you were more likely to engage, pay, stay, pay more over time. And now it's like -- and if we can get you to do it with your friends, your family, the people you love, all those things are also true. So we have a lot of optimism about family plan, but it is one of multiple things. We have real optimism with that.

And it seems like some recent commentary, it's -- you're seeing a lot of adoption with the existing base. Is it actually helping to drive new customers or sort of I guess it's early days, but do you expect it to have an impact on churn as well?

Yes. What I'll say is so far, the early adoption and what you saw in the third quarter was majority about upgrades because that's where we were marketing it. But in the third quarter, I think in September, we also began to market family plan to new subscribers of the bundle, prospects to the bundle and prospects for games. So you could buy a bundle family plan or a games family plan. And I'll just tell you, if you have not already, you should search for on YouTube, a film we made with Eli Manning, which we obviously cut into, I think, a 30 and a 60. The long version is -- they're all awesome, watch the long version, where he is choosing amongst the other Mannings who he's going to share his 3 additional. But really, really high hopes for all of it.

Cool. Third quarter was your highest quarter of single product net adds. Can you talk about why you decided to move the mini behind the paywall and maybe the criteria that management uses to make these decisions?

Yes. That's a good question. Let me say we were really happy with the performance in the quarter and subscribers came from like across the whole portfolio, which is the model kind of working as it's designed to work. And in any given time period, different products are going to perform differently. That's the case now in subs. It's also the case in ads. On the decision to make the MINI a paid game, I would think about that in terms of the time having been on a -- having it be a real strategic pillar to always be doing two things that seem like they're in opposition, but we have to do both at the same time. One is to continually be finding the widest possible engaged audience for the work. And the second is to be adding more and more value to the paid product so that there is more and more willingness -- there are more people willing to pay or more willingness to pay for that paid product. And that's what you saw us do with the MINI. We are always calibrating between what is the right moment to do that. And in the case of the MINI, we had a sense based on the engagement characteristics of the game and sort of the MINI in the context of games more broadly that we could make it a paid product without really losing a huge kind of free-to-play audience, and that has played out. We're very happy with the performance. And we also timed its sort of going into the paid product set with the release of a new game into the sort of full spectrum. We had a game in beta called Pips, which is a great logic puzzle that everybody should be playing. I'm not very good at it. But Pips sort of came out as a major game for the whole audience at the same time. And so it made sense. And we now have 5 free-to-play games and 5 games that are either fully or in part behind the paywall. And you should also know that we are always working our robust pipeline for new games. So there are always new games in development at the same time.

So it was very powerful in driving subs this quarter. Are there other levers that you could pull either in games or in other parts of the business to sort of drive the subscriber -- to drive people into the sort of paid subscriber base?

Yes. I mean one of the things we have real confidence in is that the model across the whole of the portfolio has multiple levers in it. And you can regard the MINI as kind of like a microcosm of what gives us that confidence that we can keep penetrating the market. The idea is that as we prioritize adding value in each part of the portfolio, we're getting optionality to choose kind of when in which part of the portfolio and where it makes sense to make something into a paid product. And one of the things that's really helped us is the tech and our ability to use data is getting better and better, so we can really understand the dynamic of how we grow audience and where is the right kind of place and moment to ask people to pay. I'll just say stepping back, the thing -- two things to hold in mind as you think about those levers and the experience with the MINI in particular, we are always trying to balance growing that engaged audience with making sure there's -- we're monetizing in direct ways, and we're balancing those two things in service to long-term value creation. And the great thing about our model because we have multiple revenue streams, subs, ads, licensing, affiliate, all of that engagement we're growing is monetizable to us in one way or another.

Right. And it's leading not just to subscriber growth, but you talked about steady year-over-year ARPU growth going forward. Can you talk about sort of the drivers of this and just your overall confidence you can maintain those trends and still sort of maintain pricing power?

Yes. You asked about subscriber growth earlier, and now you're asking about ARPU. It's just worth saying the thing we're ultimately trying to maximize is long-term subscriber revenue growth, subscription revenue growth. And that is a function, obviously, of the number of subscribers and also ARPU. We're really pleased with where we've gotten so far in ARPU. And obviously, we don't guide to ARPU, but we have -- we're expecting to have another strong quarter in fourth quarter of subscription revenue growth. And what gives us confidence in sort of the ARPU trajectory going forward is, one, that thing that I keep saying, which is we are adding -- each part of the portfolio is already very valuable and kind of getting more rare and valuable relative to other things, but we're adding more kind of with every passing quarter and year, one. Two, we have seen, and we've talked about this for a couple of years now, kind of consistently strong subscriber engagement, and that is a very good signal of willingness to pay and pay more over time. And then lastly, we used to talk about this so much more than we do now, our ability to get people to pay more at the step-up moment, so to move up to an interim or a full price is just -- we continue to be really pleased with what we see there.

Great. You started off talking about ways to drive engagement and maybe sort of widen the focus from a demographic standpoint or to pull in people of different ages. And I think the -- what you've done on the video and audio side has been a big part of that. Can you talk about the engagement from these new mediums and what that's doing to your business, especially the launch of the watched tab that you saw that you did in October? Just what are the early sort of returns that we've seen from that development.

Yes. So I have no doubt that all the things we're doing around format innovation and particularly more video is helping to drive that consistently strong engagement. And I'll give you two things from the year that we are concluding. One, we've doubled just the amount of news video. So we are covering the big stories of the day now much more with video than we were before. And that's coming off of a year where we really increased the production there, and it's still early days in that. And two, now more than half of all the people who are coming to The Times and engaging with The Times on our own platforms are engaging with video. So that is really great. And I want to say it is not just about engaging the audience we already have more, which we certainly believe we are doing. It is also about using video and new formats to bring new audiences to The Times, and we're going after that really ambitiously. We've got more news video. We've got a lot more just reporter on camera video, talking about their stories in short form, which is great for any number of reasons. We have more shows and those shows are getting sort of bigger and broader and you can find them in more places and they're touching culture even more. And then we have video efforts in every part of the lifestyle portfolio, including one of my favorites on -- the Athletic now, you've got highlights, not just the highlights, not just game footage, but footage mixed with our signature journalism from the NFL, from the NBA and the NHL. So kind of video in many, many places. The Watch tab specifically launched in the third quarter, launched in our flagship app. And there, it is really early, but we really like what we see so far in terms of engagement and just the kind of the reviews of it have been very, very positive. And the way to think about that is it is by no means all that we're doing in video. What it is, is like a home where you can go and sort of see the report, the best of our video in one scrolling experience. And you're getting news video, of course, kind of time to the news of the day, but also video from all the other parts of the portfolio.

Right. It seems that over time, I mean, that Watch tab is so easy to use. And on a mobile basis, it would seem that over time, it could become the primary way with which people, on a mobile basis, engage with New York Times.

What I would say is in a future state, imagine the New York, when people think of The New York Times, they are thinking they're just as likely to think about watching The Times as they are reading and listening to The Times. I also want to say, though, we are really focused on the engagement and impact of all of our work, and we regard video as additive, but it is by no means the only thing we're doing. And all of the ways that we can engage the audience we already have more and engage new audience, that's text, that's video, that's audio, that's multimedia, that's data visualization, we are hard at work on all of it. The idea is widest possible audience for to work deeply engaged.

And it's early days, but is it reaching a younger demo?

I mean it's hard to imagine it's not, right? We know that huge swaths of people, especially young people now are getting a lot of their news on the hyperscaled video platforms. And so all this increase in production of video, and again, still early at it, is allowing us to have our brand, have our stories in this really fresh, modern way in front of a new generation. And now with the Watch tab and the video kind of coursing through the whole portfolio, we're giving them when they do ultimately come to us, we're giving them sort of a way to experience the thing that made them seek us out to begin.

And how do you see the Watch tab product evolving? Do you expect that over time, it will branch out into sort of non-New York Times content as well?

That's a good question. Right now, we are focused on really widening the audience for it and getting a lot of engagement. And we're focused on taking the work of the journalism we already have and making it great in video and even more impactful in video. And I will say, as you go through the tab, you're going to see a lot of news, but you're also going to see cooking and athletic and Wirecutter and like you're going to see great stories from culture in The New York Times. So it is a really robust experience with our journalism, and we're just at the beginning of it.

And I know that there's no advertising on the tab as it stands now. What is there...

Yes. Listen, we've got a really good track record of build a great product, get real audience and engagement for it. And once you do that, introduce all the ways to monetize it, including with advertising.

Got you. Okay. Moving on to a new topic, AI. How does New York Times think about AI? And is it a friend or foe for the company?

Listen, I think The New York Times has a real -- if you step back, The New York Times has a really great track record now, certainly over the last decade of harnessing technological innovation to grow audience, to grow engagement and to grow value for society and to grow value for shareholders. And I have a lot of confidence we will do that with AI as we have done that with digital technology and mobile technology and kind of everything else that has come before it. And we certainly have a lot of people working on AI and working with AI to begin to do that. And I'm just going to give you a handful of examples that I think sort of get at what I'm talking about. You can now listen to most of The New York Times news report in an automated voice that makes the report much more accessible to people, and we're in like the third generation of that voice. It's an AI, and it's awesome. I get a lot of my news that way. We've got reporters in the newsroom using AI to come through huge troves of documents, public documents. They can do that now much more productively, much more efficiently, which just enhances the quality of the journalism. We have metrics conversion and scaling recipes and cooking powered by AI. If you were buying gifts with Wirecutter, our search is much better on Wirecutter now because of AI, and we're using it in all the ways you would imagine to personalize the customer journey. We've been using AI for years in the monetization points and just to target our own marketing more effectively. Now I will say what I'm describing assumes our IP will be used in a lawful way, but we have a lot of confidence in our ability to harness technology to grow value for everyone.

So along those lines, first of all, you have an existing deal with Amazon. How should we think about the opportunity to license the content...

Yes. I mean we have said all along, we are open to doing deals when they support our essential subscription strategy when we see those deals as providing sustainable fair value exchange. And when the terms of those deals allow us to have real control over how our work, how our IP is used and we have a track record of doing deals when the terms are right. And at the same time, you see us enforcing our rights in court because we regard all of that together as building toward a world where there's long-term sustainable fair value exchange here.

Right. And along those lines, last week, you filed a lawsuit against Perplexity adding to the existing lawsuits with Microsoft and OpenAI. How do you make the decision whether to seek settlement in court or move ahead with negotiations for a licensing agreement?

I would regard those two things, the idea of participation in the deals market that exists now and the enforcement of our legal rights as kind of other piece and building toward all in service to a market where there is sustainable long-term fair value exchange.

Got you. It seems like the recent acceleration in digital advertising revenue growth has been driven by new ad supply in specific verticals, namely sports, games and new audio and video impressions. Is a low 20s sort of high teens growth rate in digital advertising sustainable?

Let me say a few things about the ad business. First, we are really happy with the performance this year. We're very excited about it. We regard the ad business now kind of like we regard the consumer business, which is we have these rare and valuable products in really big spaces where there's a lot of consumer demand. We have an enormous amount of audience engagement for those products, which makes us really appealing to marketers well in news and well beyond news out. And we have great ad products, really great canvases with a lot of first-party data that we can use to target audiences marketers are trying to reach in great ways. So we don't guide past the quarter. We've guided to another strong quarter of growth in digital advertising and advertising, but we -- I would just say we feel really good about where we are and really excited about the ad business.

Great. Let's sort of pivot to the cost side. Can you talk about your approach to cost management? And is your cost growth trending higher over time? And if so, what are the drivers behind that?

Yes. I mean, I think, we've got a very good track record now of actively managing our costs while very deliberately and thoughtfully investing into the areas that sort of constitute our long-term competitive advantage, which has been our journalism and our -- the quality and the strength of our digital products. I have a lot of confidence you're going to continue to see us do both of those things. And I would say I've talked a lot about video. Video feels like an opportunity where we see real potential for investment leading to long-term returns, and we are seizing that opportunity.

Yes. I would say the output of that equation is that you've been able to drive sort of 200 basis points of margin improvement per year over the last couple of years. Do you see that as a sustainable sort of rate of growth over the next several years?

We're really pleased with where we've gotten on margin in the high teens so far. We are always endeavoring to build a larger and a more profitable company, and we are highly, highly focused on revenue growth, AOP growth margin expansion. And I've just described to you many, many levers for growth in the model. I think as we continue to build our engaged audience, that's like the most important high-octane gas in the whole -- in the tank of everything we do at -- The New York Times. And as we continue to build our subscriber base, I think you're going to continue to see us find leverage in that model.

Great. And then maybe one on the balance sheet. You have no debt and cash building on the balance sheet. How should we think of sort of uses of cash going forward?

Yes. I mean, listen, we have a nicely cash-generative model that's really working. We like that, and we like having the strong balance sheet we do, particularly at a time of real dynamism and opportunity in the market. In terms of capital allocation broadly, sort of no change to what we've been saying for a while now, which is our first priority is to invest into furthering the essential subscription strategy. It's the best way we can create value for society and in this context for shareholders. And beyond that, we continue to be committed to returning at least 50% of our free cash flow to shareholders.

And should we think of more of a focus on buybacks or dividends or sort of what is your [indiscernible]?

I would say we're doing both, and I wouldn't read too much into sort of the near-term fluctuations in one or the other.

Got it. All right. Maybe to wrap up, I would say we've had almost 2 days here of conversations with companies. And I would say New York Times is one of the few companies I can think of that has sort of successfully made the pivot from an analog business to a digital business. What would you say are the sort of high-level sort of learnings from your experience in driving that? Then Netflix is the other one which obviously made a lot of news here yesterday. What I would put New York Times, you had a business that people were really worried about. And now the vast majority of your business is digital. And from what we've seen in the last several quarters, accelerating nicely. So what would you say were the main drivers behind that success?

I love that question. And I'll say I've been here for more than a dozen years now. Our CFO, who is our -- who's here with me today, Will Bardeen has been here for like 21 years, was our Head of Strategy before that. I think we would both say it's been really fun to get to create a long-term strategy and then really give the time and the space and the resources and the like the diligence and the care to letting that long-term strategy play out. I can't say enough about that. I think the unique structure of The Times has allowed us to do that. So that's like my biggest lesson, which is pick the right strategy and then really stick to it. And we have done that now for more than a decade. I mean it feels like our jobs get more fun because we're getting to see the fruits of it and also imagine the next tranche of real value creation and opportunity seizing for The Times. If I were to be even a little bit more specific, the lesson that has repeated -- I've had 4 jobs at -- The New York Times. I've been in this one for more than 5 years, but I was Head of advertising. I ran the sub business, and I took over the whole sort of product center of the company. The lesson in all 4 of those jobs that has repeated again and again and again is the answer to like every value creation question begins with can we find the widest possible audience for the work and get them to engage, engage more, engage more directly, have more of a habit with us. All the ways we make money stem from that. And so we have been relentlessly, relentlessly focused on that. I'll say two more things that I've kind of said in the course of our conversation that are worth naming out loud. -- even going back a decade, we refused to choose between these two opposing ideas of having a giant audience free, wide free layer where you really get engagement and then having products that are not just worth paying for, but increasingly so to more and more people. We have forced ourselves to like relentlessly pursue both of those things. And I think that some of what you're seeing in the ad business now is a function of that. But that -- and the continued -- obviously, continued growth in subscribers is a function of that. And then the last thing I'll say is I think what we do in every dimension, high-quality independent journalism first and most, but also sports journalism, shopping advice, recipes, games. All of those things, the way that we do them are getting more rare and more valuable against a backdrop of lots of other things happening in the information ecosystem that are not about quality or getting sort of the best stuff to people or the fairest, most independent kind of stuff that people really need to live their lives in a full and joyful way.

That's perfect. Great summary, Meredith. Thanks for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.