How can The New York Times and other news outlets grow their subscribers and product value? — Part 1 of 2.

Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer or any other institution.

This is part 1 of the 2 series article with a high-level Digital Product Innovation Strategy for The New York Times (NYT) and other similar news outlets. You can also read, Solutions, Part 2 of 2 — How can The New York Times and other news outlets grow their subscribers and product value?

With the rise of misinformation across the world, it would make sense that citizens rely on trusted sources, journalists, and experts when they face any anxiety or uncertainty about critical matters. There are many reputable news outlets across the world for trusted sources but with the rise of smartphones, it has become second nature for many of us to turn to social media apps to gather information. One could argue that traditional news outlets just do not have the growth hacking skills as the social media tech giants do. But I would say that news outlets — 1) do not fully understand the true value of their journalists, and subscribers as a community, 2) still offer the digital experience as a traditional newspaper, 3) have increasingly become polarized, and 4) keep losing audience to social media app algorithms which made it easier to surface news that we were collectively seeking at any given time.

Even though personally I source most of my information (local/global events) from the news outlet apps to stay informed, I continue to witness how the large population around us defaults to Twitter or other social media apps. I must admit that sometimes my teenager comes across the same news faster via some share on Instagram or Snapchat than I do from a direct source.

As I started to research this behavior, I felt it was necessary to write a digital product innovation strategy that is more in line with the current landscape for the news outlets. It was also important for me to build this case on one of the most reputable news outlets — The New York Times due to its long history, continuous innovation, and the overall size of its digital subscribers. This will also help other news outlets uncover specific areas that can be applied to their own product innovation strategy.

Current Landscape

Listing the approximate number of subscribers during 2021–2022 for some of the top news outlets —

• New York Times, U.S. — The Times reported 9.107 million subscribers at the end of the first quarter of 2022. That number was revised in the last quarter’s results down to 9.01 million subscribers (3 Aug 22, source).
• The Wall Street Journal, U.S. — digital only, 3.1 million subscribers (8 Aug 22, Fiscal year-end 30 June 22, source)
• The Washington Post, U.S. — approx. 3.0 million subscribers (26 Apr 21, source)
• The Economist, U.K. — approx. 1.2 million (1,185,000) subscribers as reported in the 2022 Annual Report Summary (source)
• The Globe & Mail, Canada — approx. 170,000 subscribers (April 2021, source), aiming to reach 350,000 digital and print subscriptions by 2023 according to the article posted by the Press Gazette.

Before we dive into The New York Times case study and a new digital product innovation strategy, let’s review some of the generic problems that news outlets are currently facing in the market —

Problems

1. Top news outlets or agencies across North America and Europe have grown their digital readership or subscribers at a slower rate, whereas social media companies continue to grow subscribers, content engagement, and advertising revenues to unprecedented levels (see chart below). Social media companies blatantly build the hype around the news content that is published by the news outlets and also recommend their journalists’ accounts to followers on their apps to grow user engagement.

Social Media Platform Growth, ARK

2. Social media companies, for the most part, continue to avoid any responsibility that a news organization has to comply with. Social media app users repurpose the original news to spread misinformation and their algorithms bring them to the forefront as it grows engagement. For the news outlets, in addition to hiring top journalists, there are many other additional costs in generating original news stories and maintaining compliance that social media companies are able to avoid easily.

3. Despite a large number of unique visitors, many of these top news outlets fail to turn their unique visitors into loyal paying subscribers. Silicon Valley technology companies are experts in turning visitors into paying subscribers by introducing growth tactics like bundles, referrals, free add-ons, instant gratification, rewards, sticky features, etc. Based on the chart below, if we look at the New York Times with 100 million unique visitors, their current 9.01 million subscribers are not even close to the value that is offered by them. (Source — 23 June 22, the chart below by The Washington Post PR.)

The Washington Post, Total Digital Population, Unique Visitors (millions), May 2022

The New York Times Logo

The New York Times (NYT), Digital Product Innovation Strategy

As one of the largest news organizations with multiple adjacent revenue streams, and a steady growth of subscribers, New York Times has not even captured 5% of the U.S. population as paying subscribers.

Brief History

• The New York Times was started in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond (an American journalist and politician) and George Jones (a journalist). In fact, Henry Jarvis Raymond was also the chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and was considered the godfather of the Republican party.
• Both Henry and George worked together at the New York Tribune, which was at the time, the dominant newspaper of the Whig party and then the Republican party.
• The vision for these two founders was to actually create content that is not just good and attracts subscribers, but is truthful and helps people understand the world through a lens that isn’t either fake or polarizing in either direction.
• Around 1896, 45 years after its founding, the New York Times was on the precipice of bankruptcy and Adolph Ochs (a newspaper publisher) took over the brand. He pulled NYT out of bankruptcy by dropping the price of the newspaper from 3 cents at the time to 1 cent, which led to the increase in circulation from 25K to 75K (cha-ching 💸).
• Adolph Ochs handed over the thrones to Arthur Sulzberger, who was his son-in-law, and that basically led the Sulzberger family into this now five-generation control over the NYT publication.
• Sulzberger family succession continues to this day to A.G. Sulzberger. One of the updates was on Dec. 14, 2017, A.G. Sulzberger, 37, to Take Over as New York Times Publisher.
• A.G. Sulzberger is now the Chairman and Publisher of the NYT.

Ironic to see how NYT has evolved over time from the Republican founder and at times polarizing (more on that by well-known journalist Bari Weiss’ resignation letter to the NYT).

NYT’s Innovation Journey

As a 170 years old company, we must recognize that NYT has worked through the innovator’s dilemma many times and the business model kept changing over time in the media and technology world.

• The New York Times website went live in 1986.
• NYT’s average weekday print circulation peaked in 1994 at 1.18 million papers circulated per day. Now it is at 800,000 subscribers in the print publication with a steady decrease since 1994.
• In March 2014, A.G. Sulzberger, (then Metro Assistant Editor and now Chairman and Publisher), collaborated with other forward-thinking minds from around the newsroom to develop smart, sound ways to lift their fortunes through journalism. A.G. Sulzberger led the New York Times Innovation report 2014. Some of the areas they recognized well in the report were — disruptive innovation, customer segmentation, changing competitive landscape, non-traditional competitor growth, focus on audience growth, mapping a strategy to make a digital-first newsroom, experimentation, influencer mapping, expanding op-eds, readers experience, etc.
• Roughly, 4 years ago NYT had set a goal to hit 10 million paid subscribers by 2025. As shared above, they now have 9.01 million subscribers (3 Aug 22, source) and will potentially reach 10 million by their target year.
• The revenue for NYT peaked in 2000 at $3.3 billion and in 2021 the revenue was $2.1 billion, which was still approx. 30% to 40% down from the all-time high.
• Their next goal is to get to 15 million paid subscribers by 2027 and I personally think they do not fully understand the value of their worldwide reach, journalist ecosystem, and media partnerships.

Based on the NYT journey so far, I feel that A.G. Sulzberger and the NYT management team are conservative with their future goals because —

1. They are not making attempts to fully understand who their future subscribers are, and the potential value that can be generated by their journalists.
2. They have a vision that is disconnected from the reality of our future digital experiences.
3. They did not yet take into account the massive growth in digital advertising, social commerce, and the time spent online by the end users (see sample projections in the chart below on time spent online).

Discretionary free time spent online by users based on recent trends in 2021, ARK

How can The New York Times (NYT) deepen its value and grow loyal subscribers?

Before developing a new strategic roadmap, the NYT management team should consider investigating some of these critical questions —

• What business do our current and future subscribers think that we are really in now?
• How are our products (news, media, opinions, reports, lifestyle content, videos, games, etc.) consumed by our different end customers across geographies?
• How do our customers show loyalty and demonstrate engagement with our brand, the journalists, and the guest contributors?
• How is our product, adding value to our end customers’ daily lives (education, awareness, fun, leisure, lifestyle)?
• How might we avoid polarization and build a trusted community between our brand, journalists, guest experts, and our end customers to fight misinformation in a meaningful way?
• How might we display confidence in our “source information” through an inclusive user experience and command deeper authority over the information we publish?
• How might we hold social media apps or any of our contributing guest experts responsible for any misinformation in addition to our journalists?
• How might we surface authoritative experts (not biased politicians) with unbiased, verified sources of information to help our end customers make informed decisions?
• How might we facilitate healthy dialogue and trust between our journalists and our end customers on an ongoing basis to grow product engagement?
• How might we align incentives for our journalists and amplify their NYT profiles for them to engage readers on NYT digital properties instead of social media apps?
• How might we partner with social media apps to embed ongoing engagement with our journalists from the NYT digital properties to their social media feeds?

What are some of the fundamentals that The New York Times (NYT) and other news outlets must revisit?

1. Build a community with journalists and grow engagement —

• Start with a mindset where the experience is journalists > content > engagement as opposed to content > engagement > journalists. Readers will still appreciate how the content is organized now by categories but news outlets need to allow flexibility on how readers want to curate their own news feed. There is a lot of original content in the NYT and readers can easily miss this great content because of its category. But if a reader is following multiple journalists, topics, categories, keywords, etc., NYT would be able to use that data and offer a more personalized and engaging experience by optimizing its curated feed of content. It will also help the NYT recommend relevant content or authors to grow engagement. Currently, the “For You” section of the NYT mobile app experience is mostly irrelevant to what I am interested in. For example, as a subscriber, I have been reading business articles for over 6 months but the “For You” section has never recommended sign-up for the Dealbook. I only recently came across my ability to follow a topic-based newsletter with curated business articles called the Dealbook. I would still prefer to follow Dealbook as a topic in my NYT digital feed experience as opposed to receiving an email newsletter but that feature is not available to subscribers.
• There are some news outlets like the Financial Times (myFT feature) where journalists and topics are at the forefront (myFT image below), whereas with NYT you are forced to follow the journalists on noisy Twitter (see Alissa J. Rubin’s profile page image below). At NYT, 100s of journalists, creatives, and executive staff have a huge following on Twitter and other social media channels. So I am not able to comprehend why NYT would not offer an engaging experience for those social media followers on its own digital properties. Today, each article has a commenting feature but it is more about controlling the narrative than engaging the subscriber. See the comment form image below, where even as a registered, paying subscriber I have to enter my name and location before sharing my thoughts. There is also no guarantee that my comment will be published, which encourages the reader to engage on Twitter or Facebook by linking to the article.
• The NYT is not only consistently driving users away from engaging on their own digital properties but also helping Twitter grow its user base by linking authors’ Twitter profile links at the bottom of each NYT content. For example, this recent article was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin who has over 915k Twitter followers with other prominent contributors (see article footer image below). The current NYT model is encouraging its talented journalists and creatives to grow their Twitter following.

The question NYT management should be asking here is — How might we bring all talented, authoritative journalists and creatives under a community that is endorsed by a trusted brand like the NYT so that their loyal fans and followers end up engaging with them on the NYT as opposed to social media?

Images from point 1 above —

Subscribers can follow authors on the Financial Times under myFT but on The New York Times you are redirected to engage on Twitter

Registered, paying users on The New York Times app has to fill out personal information before commenting on an article (left) and The New York Times is driving traffic away to Twitter & Facebook as opposed to monetizing its credible Journalists (right).

2. Build a responsible, trusted network —

As literary experts, news outlets must try to reimagine what could be the opposite of a free-flow social network that is full of biased information. A responsible network of vetted experts, educators, and journalists who are focused on empowering subscribers with information that is gained from unbiased, reliable, and verified sources. I strongly believe that it is a reputable institution like the NYT where an unbiased social network could thrive in collaboration with other authoritative experts and verified informed citizens.

3. Build a network that is closer to our reality —

The NYT already has some of these areas covered but they could build a dedicated digital experience that is the opposite of social networks (Facebook, Instagram) that only encourages users to post or portray their ideal, happy life stories. In recent years, numerous studies have shown that these ideal life stories on social media continue to have adverse effects on adolescents (see multiple news articles on this topic below). These young adults are the future subscribers of the NYT and they need a trusted network that covers realistic lifestyles, inspiring stories of everyday humans, and how they overcome challenges or adversity. A network that provides basic literacy across critical life skills — education, healthy lifestyle, travel, sports, financial wellbeing, home ownership, etc.

• WSJ, Sept 2021 — Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show
• The Washington Post, Sept 2021 — Instagram is even worse than we thought for kids. What do we do about it?
• Forbes, Oct 2021 — Here’s How Instagram Harms Young Women According To Research

4. Put humanity first and profits after —

With the lack of regulations, we are all aware that identities are being faked across social media, and checks are often ignored to avoid user friction in favor of growth and engagement metrics. In recent news, social media giant Facebook turned a blind eye to “friendly fraud” targeting kids and also allowed fewer checks to gain wider acceptance of credit cards in different countries, leading to financial fraud and money laundering. At the NYT, we can put social well-being at the forefront of the digital network to grow engagement. The NYT may build a network of verified accounts and maintain financial information data that is inspired by the likes of PayPal and not Facebook.

5. Learn from history —

As the NYT plans to set new goals, it must go deeper to understand how our previous generations socialized and grew their knowledge. We can learn a lot from the rise of “learned society” across North America and Europe in the mid-late 1700s. The NYT has the capabilities to build a digital-first learned society with access to verified experts and regulated bodies of knowledge. The NYT could encourage these new digital-first learned societies to effectively engage online as well as meet through in-person events. As the NYT grows, it can evolve this trusted network by avoiding conspiring echo chambers that spread biased information.

Solutions

We will be discussing some of the solutions to these fundamentals discussed above in part 2 of the article. Watch out for the link.

Links — sources, inspiration, related information —

• Harvard Business Review article — Social Media Companies Should Self-Regulate. Now — by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, and David B. Yoffie, January 15, 2021
• About Adolph Ochs (1858–1935)
• Link to the New York Times Innovation report 2014
• Alex Lieberman — Cofounder, Morning Brew, and host of Founder’s Journal