The New York Times grew its number of paying online readers by 19% last year, and slowed the rates of decline in its print and digital advertising businesses, the company said Thursday.
Announcing its fourth quarter and end of year results, the New York Times Company said it made an operating profit of $68.9m in the fourth quarter of 2013, compared with $35.4m in the same period of 2012.
The rise was largely driven by the sale of its New England Media Group, which included the Boston Globe and other titles. For all of 2013, the company had an operating profit of $156.1m compared to $103.7m in 2012.
The Times launched a paywall in 2011 that limits the number of free articles readers can access on its site. In the fourth quarter of last year, the Times Company added another 33,000 digital subscribers, ending the year with a total of 760,000. Revenues from digital-only subscriptions increased to about $149.1m in 2013, a 33.5% increase over the prior year, excluding the effect of an additional week for accounting purposes in 2012.
“2013 was a busy year for the Company,” said Mark Thompson, the president and chief executive officer. “We launched a new strategy, reorganized the company, re-energized our advertising department under new leadership, rebranded our international newspaper as the International New York Times and sold the New England Media Group. In 2014, we will build on those efforts with new digital consumer product launches beginning in the spring, new digital advertising products, and a continued focus on international growth.”
Thompson said advertising revenues had showed notable improvements in the second half of the year. In the fourth quarter, they declined 1% on a like-for-like basis compared to the same period last year, the best quarterly performance in three years.
The Times, like its competitors, has been hit hard by declining print ad sales as readers move online. The shift to digital ad revenues has proven difficult, and revenues have declined in a saturated market. Overall, during 2013, print and digital advertising revenues decreased 7.0% and 4.3%, respectively.
Print advertising revenue dropped 1.6% during the last three months of 2013, compared with the same quarter a year earlier. Digital revenue fell 0.2%. Those declines were substantially smaller than earlier in the year. In the first quarter of 2013, print and digital advertising revenues decreased 13.3% and 4%.
The Times has recently revamped its advertising team and has been developing branded content, known as “native advertising,” on the Times website. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr recently wrote to the Times’ employees to assure them of a “strict separation between the newsroom and the job of creating content for the new native ads.”
The Times’ results follow those of newspaper chain Gannett, owner of USA Today and one of the largest newspaper publishers in the US.
On Tuesday, Gannett announced a 12% drop in revenues as print and broadcasting revenue declined in the fourth quarter. Digital revenues, including news websites and job search site CareerBuilder.com, rose 6.1% to $390.6m.
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