The New York Times reported more than 10 million digital-only subscriptions at the end of the third quarter of 2024, passing a target it had set for 2025 — and doing it with a bundle, not a single product. That figure, disclosed in the company's own quarterly filing, makes the Times the largest subscription success in news publishing. One outlet, one market, and the disclosure is the company's own — but the construction underneath the number is worth taking apart, because parts of it generalize and parts do not.
Licht Journal publishes information and analysis, not investment or business advice; figures here are self-reported company disclosures unless noted.
Where did the 10 million actually come from?
Not from news alone. The Times ended Q3 2024 with roughly 10.5 million digital-only subscribers and about 11.1 million total when print was included, per its quarterly report. The growth engine was the bundle: News, Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic sold together. By 2024 the company said a substantial share of new digital subscribers were taking multiple products, and bundle subscribers were, in the company's words, more engaged and less likely to cancel than single-product subscribers. The exact bundle share moved quarter to quarter, but the direction never changed: the more products a subscriber used, the stickier they were.
The strategic shift dates to 2019, when the company set a target of 10 million subscriptions by 2025 — a goal critics called aggressive at the time. It acquired The Athletic in January 2022 for $550 million, a deal widely questioned because the sports outlet was losing money. By 2024 The Athletic had turned its first quarterly operating profit, and its role in the bundle looked very different from its role as a standalone loss-maker.
What did the bundle do to ARPU and churn?
Average revenue per digital-only subscriber — ARPU, revenue per subscriber over a period — rose above $9 per month during 2024, per company filings, even as promotional introductory pricing pulled new subscribers in below that. The mechanism is simple arithmetic: a subscriber paying for news plus Games plus Cooking generates more revenue than a news-only subscriber at the same or lower churn.
Churn — the share of subscribers who cancel in a period — was not disclosed as a precise number by the Times, which is common. What the company did disclose, repeatedly, was that bundle subscribers retained better and that total digital-only subscription revenue grew quarter after quarter, reaching annualized rates above $1 billion in subscription revenue overall by 2024. The honest reading: engagement across products reduces churn, and the Times built three non-news products expressly to manufacture that engagement.
Can a regional or niche outlet copy this?
Partly. The parts that transfer:
- Habit products beat news products for retention. A daily game, a recipe app, a tool — something used on days without news — is the cheapest churn insurance the Times found. A niche outlet can build one utility product; it cannot build five.
- Price experiments are cheaper than product launches. The Times moved introductory offers, annual plans and student pricing constantly before committing to bundle construction.
- The first 30 days predict year one. The company's stated focus on onboarding and habit formation — getting a subscriber to a second product quickly — predates the bundle itself.
The parts that do not transfer:
- Scale of news investment. The Times spent heavily on journalism through the 2010s while ad revenue collapsed, betting on subscription revenue that did not exist yet. Few balance sheets allow that.
- The acquisition budget. The Athletic, Cooking and Games were bought or built with resources unavailable to almost every other publisher.
- Brand-driven trial. A large share of Times conversions come from people arriving already convinced of the brand. A local outlet converts readers who arrive for one story.
What generalizes, plainly?
The Times' result is evidence of one case: a global news brand with capital, a games product with tens of millions of users, and a decade of pricing data. What generalizes is the structural insight — retention is built from frequency of use, and frequency of use is easier to manufacture outside the news cycle than inside it. What does not generalize is the scale. A publisher with 20,000 subscribers who adds a useful habit product and tightens onboarding is running the same play with the same logic, not the same outcome. The outlets that tried bundle strategies and folded do not publish retrospectives; survivorship bias runs hot in this genre.
A caution on the numbers
Subscription counts are self-reported, and the Times counts subscriptions, not distinct people — a household with News and Games counts twice in some framings, though the company reports both total subscribers and total subscriptions. Rivals report differently, which makes cross-outlet comparisons unreliable. When you read that a publisher has X million subscribers, check whether the number is digital-only or includes print, subscriptions or subscribers, and whether growth came from acquisitions. Those three questions dissolve most false analogies.
| Metric (Times disclosure, Q3 2024) | Figure | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Digital-only subscribers | ~10.5 million | Bundle vs single-product split |
| Total subscribers incl. print | ~11.1 million | Print decline rate |
| Digital-only ARPU | Over $9/month | Intro pricing pressure |
| The Athletic | First quarterly operating profit, 2024 | Whether it holds beyond launch quarters |
The math the Times proved is that a news business can live on reader revenue at scale. The math it did not prove is that any given outlet can reach that scale. Both sentences belong in every strategy deck that quotes the 10 million.
For more context, read Bundling works — when you have enough products to bundle: a publisher's guide.
For more context, read the athletic profitability.
For more context, read What a free newsletter subscriber is actually worth.