Revenue Streams at the New York Times

The New York Times ($NYT) filed its latest corporate earnings report on Wednesday, giving the Calcbench research time another chance to engage in one of our favorite pastimes: analysis of segment disclosures!

Specifically, the NYT reports two revenue streams, subscription and advertising, for two separate customer categories: online and print customers. That lets us ask some interesting questions:


  • How much is online revenue growing as a portion of total revenue? 

  • Is online revenue growing fast enough to replace declining print revenue? 

  • Is online revenue growing fast enough to keep revenue growing overall? 


Using our Export Data Tables feature, we were able to answer those questions within a few minutes. We tracked subscription and advertising revenue for print customers, the same for online customers, added everything up — and that let us see how print and online revenue compared as portions of the total revenue mix.


Figure 1, below, shows that online revenue is surging along quite nicely.



We should note that print and online revenue added together don’t equal total revenue precisely, because the Times does have several smaller lines of revenue not included here. Nonetheless, the Times is now clearly a digital publication with a legacy business delivering print newspapers to people’s doorsteps. 


Calcbench can also dig up historical data for revenue segments like this, often going years back. It’s not always perfect because companies do sometimes change their reporting segments or add new segments, but many times you can still get great historical data.


For example, Figure 2, below, shows digital subscription revenue (but not digital advertising revenue) as a percentage of total revenue, going back to the start of 2020. 



Just another example of the insights you can get into corporate performance, if you dig into the right data!

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