The New York Times Co. ’s second-quarter revenue rose 24% on a strong rebound in its advertising business, coupled with slowing subscriber growth.
The company’s results benefited from comparisons with 2020, an anomalous year in which advertisers slashed spending and news audiences soared. Operating profit more than doubled from a year earlier, hitting $73.3 million. Subscriber additions continued to slow down after rapid growth during the Trump years and the early stages of the pandemic.
The Times added 140,000 subscriptions, including 77,000 for news products and 65,000 for the company’s cooking, games and Audm audio products in the second quarter. Amid an unprecedented news cycle in the second quarter of 2020, the Times reported adding 669,000 net new digital subscriptions, its largest-ever single-quarter increase.
“We saw moderated growth in net subscription additions in the second quarter, which we expected given that the second quarter is traditionally our softest of the year, and we were comparing against last year’s historic results at the beginning of the Covid crisis,” Chief Executive Meredith Kopit Levien said.
Total subscriptions rose 22% from a year earlier but just 1.5% from the first quarter of this year. Just after the quarter closed, The Times crossed 8 million paid subscriptions across all its products, Ms. Kopit Levien said during its earnings call. Of that amount, 1.8 million were for non-news products.