By Jaspreet Singh<\/p>\n
Aug 5 (Reuters) \u2013 The New York Times added digital subscribers more slowly in the second quarter despite a busy news cycle that included the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and the FIFA \u200bWorld Cup, worrying investors who sent its shares down more \u200cthan 13%.<\/p>\n
The newspaper added about 280,000 digital-only subscribers in the second quarter, lower than an estimate of 295,300 from Visible Alpha and the 310,000 it added in the previous quarter. Its total subscriber count now stands at 13.35 million.<\/p>\n
The results show declining search and \u200creferral \u200btraffic from Google is hurting even the Times, \u2060long seen as the standard \u2060in digital publishing due to its success in building a vast subscription business around news and lifestyle content.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe delivered our second-quarter results against the backdrop of a rapidly changing information ecosystem shaped by a small \u200bnumber of big tech companies whose moves continue to result in less traffic to publishers,\u201d CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said in a post-earnings call.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe \u2060Times isn\u2019t immune to that impact,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The \u2060company has a goal of hitting 15 million subscribers \u200bby the end of next year, which would require it to add an \u200baverage of 275,000 subscribers per quarter for the next six quarters.<\/p>\n
The \u200cslower second-quarter subscriber growth came even after it had dropped its paywall for all FIFA World Cup coverage on The Athletic and introduced new coverage formats, helping the sports website draw its \u201cbiggest audiences ever.\u201d<\/p>\n
NYT also said it expects \u2060digital-only subscription revenue to slow to between 12% and 15% in the third quarter, the mid-point of which was below the estimate of 14.2%.<\/p>\n
Looking ahead, Kopit Levien \u2060said she expects the \u200cadvances made in its sports coverage to power success \u2060in the NFL season and that video was a \u201clong-term \u200bopportunity,\u201d \u200ceven though it was playing a relatively minor role \u200bin the \u2060ad growth so far.<\/p>\n
The New York Times\u2019 flagship app features a TikTok-style vertical video feed in its Watch tab, complemented by a Shows section that offers the company\u2019s longer-form, episodic video series for on-demand viewing.<\/p>\n
Total advertising revenue rose by 11.3% to $149.1 million, beating an estimate of $146.4 million.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing \u200bby Pooja Desai)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Jaspreet Singh Aug 5 (Reuters) \u2013 The New York Times added digital subscribers more slowly in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314334,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10],"class_list":["post-314333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}