NYT

Good morning, and welcome to The New York Times Company's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be listen only mode should need assistant please signal conference specialist by pressing star key followed by zero after today presentation there will be an opportunity to ask question to as question you may press star then one on your telephone keypad to withdraw your question please press star then two please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Anthony DiClemente, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome to The New York Times Company's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. On the call today, we have Meredith Kopit Levien, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Will Bardeen, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that we will be making forward-looking statements, including about our business, strategy, and performance, based on our current expectations. Our actual results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties described in the company's 10-K and subsequent SEC filings. We'll also be referencing non-GAAP financial measures for which there are reconciliations to GAAP measures in our earnings release at investors.nytco.com. With that, I will turn the call over to Meredith.

Thanks, Anthony. Good morning, everyone. Q1 was another great quarter for The Times. We continued to see strong demand for the uncompromised journalism and premium lifestyle content that The Times is uniquely capable of delivering. We're able to meet that demand despite operating in a media environment dominated by a small number of tech companies whose moves continue to impact traffic to publishers. The Times isn't immune to that impact, but we also see real opportunity. We have a clear strategy and enduring advantages that we believe position us well for long-term growth. Let me remind you of those advantages. First, we've deliberately chosen to operate in big spaces with lots of running room ahead. Independent news coverage is a universal need, and our lifestyle products each address large global markets.

Today, we reach many tens of millions of people every week across our portfolio, and we see the opportunity to directly and deeply engage many tens of millions more. Second, we've built an unparalleled engine for creating original reporting and high-quality content in a rigorous journalistic way. Doing reporting like this at scale and across a broad range of topics essential to people's lives is hard. As others do less of it, The Times continues to invest, which makes our news coverage and our lifestyle products increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. The Pulitzers awarded earlier this week were another indication of that value and saw The Times honored in multiple categories, including investigative reporting, breaking news photography, and opinion writing. A deeply reported podcast from The Athletic Podcast Network was also honored for the first time.

We know how to harness technology to continually improve how we reach and engage audiences through innovations in our formats, features, product experiences, and proprietary datasets. We're able to monetize consistently high audience engagement through our multi-revenue stream model, which positions The Times for healthy long-term growth. We believe these four advantages are durable ones, and we're confident they'll enable us to continue building a larger and a more profitable company for many years to come. Let me share a few highlights from the quarter. Digital subscription revenues grew 16%, and we added 310,000 net new digital subscribers. That brings our total subscriber base to over 13 million and puts us further down the path to our next milestone of 15 million and beyond. Subscriber growth in the quarter was driven by multiple products across our portfolio.

Digital advertising grew 32% in the quarter. This performance exceeded our expectations and was the result of a clear strategy, capable execution, strong marketer demand, and high engagement across the portfolio. Affiliate licensing and other revenues also grew in the quarter. Finally, we stayed disciplined on costs while making focused strategic investments into our journalism and product experiences, including video, which we expect to underpin our long-term success and strong market position. Before I'll wrap, I'll note that we've made progress against all of our priorities year to date. We continue to cover the world's most important stories from every angle.

Journalists around the globe reported on the Iran War and its fallout, unpacking the military strategies along the Strait of Hormuz, the political calculations in Washington, Tehran, and Jerusalem, and the economic implications for Americans. We brought people aboard the inspirational voyage of Artemis II with interactive graphics and video. We published the result of a five-year investigation into misconduct by Civil Rights icon César Chávez, the kind of patient public-minded work that few can do like The Times. We presented our journalism and lifestyle products in an increasing array of formats, especially video, where we see an opportunity to better engage current audiences and bring millions of new people into The Times orbit. Our signature reporting now regularly comes to life in reporter videos from John Carreyrou's journey to unmask the Bitcoin creator to climate reporter Raymond Zhong's two-month expedition to Antarctica.

We're continuing to scale output here and more than doubled production of reporter video in the first quarter. We also continue to drive real impact with our trademark visual investigations, which in the first quarter examined the U.S.'s role in the bombing of an elementary school in southern Iran. We also added value in every part of our portfolio in the form of new and expanded shows, features, coverage, and more. In Q1, we officially launched our first multiplayer game called Crossplay. We added a regular Sunday edition of The Daily focused on culture and debuted a new true crime podcast from Serial. The Athletic released the latest edition of its authoritative NFL draft guide, The Beast.

Just last week, we convened an illustrious group of music industry leaders to name the 30 greatest living American songwriters in a multimedia package that included a rare interview with Taylor Swift, among others. Continuing to execute against these priorities is how we plan to get millions more people to have direct relationships and daily habits with The New York Times. As we do that, we expect 2026 to be another year of revenue growth, AOP growth, margin expansion, and strong free cash flow. With that, I'll turn it over to Will.

Thanks, Meredith, and good morning, everyone. As Meredith described, our first quarter was a strong start to 2026. Year-over-year consolidated revenues grew 12%, AOP grew by approximately 27%, and AOP margin expanded by 200 basis points. We saw healthy increases across our multiple revenue streams and continued to make disciplined investments aimed at further differentiating our high-quality journalism and digital products. I'll discuss the first quarter's key results, followed by our financial outlook for the second quarter of 2026. Please note that all comparisons are to the prior year period unless otherwise specified. I'll start with a discussion of subscription revenues. Digital-only subscription revenues grew approximately 16% to $389 million. We added 310,000 net new digital-only subscribers in the quarter, and digital-only ARPU grew 2.4%.

Total subscription revenues grew 11.3% to approximately $517 million, which was above the guidance range we provided for the quarter. We're focused on healthy long-term growth of our digital subscription revenues, and that is a function of both our overall digital subscriber base and ARPU. While subscriber net adds and ARPU can fluctuate in any given quarter for a variety of reasons, including subscriber mix and product pricing, we remain confident in the health of our subscription revenue drivers. We are adding significant value to our products, and engagement remains strong across the portfolio. We continue to be pleased with the performance of our news-centered bundle, as well as with performance at our pricing step-up points. Now turning to advertising. Total advertising revenues for the quarter were $127 million, an increase of approximately 17%, which beat our expectations.

Digital advertising revenues also came in above the guidance range we provided, increasing approximately 32% to $93 million. The growth in digital advertising was due mainly to strong marketer demand and growth in advertising supply. Affiliate licensing and other revenues increased approximately 8% in the quarter to $68.5 million, primarily as a result of higher licensing revenues. This was in line with our guidance. Adjusted operating costs grew 9.4%, largely as a result of higher compensation and benefits expenses, which included investments in our video journalism. Growth in sales and marketing costs included both marketing expenses and higher costs associated with our advertising revenues. As I mentioned at the top, AOP grew 27% in the quarter to approximately $118 million, and AOP margin expanded 200 basis points to 16.6%.

Adjusted diluted EPS increased $0.20 to $0.61. I'll note that our effective tax rate in Q1 benefited from stock awards that settled in the quarter. Going forward, we expect an annual effective tax rate between 25% and 26%, with some variability around the quarterly rate. I'll now look ahead to Q2. Digital-only subscription revenues are expected to increase 14%-17%, and total subscription revenues are expected to increase 10%-12%. Digital advertising revenues are expected to increase high teens, and total advertising revenues are expected to increase high single digits. Affiliate licensing and other revenues are expected to increase low single digits. Adjusted operating costs are expected to increase 8%-9%.

We intend to continue operating efficiently while making disciplined investments in our high-quality journalism and digital product experiences that add value for our audiences and help reinforce and expand our competitive advantages. As we've discussed, video in particular remains an important area of strategic investment being reflected in our results and in our guidance. We are confident in our ability to generate strong returns over the long term as we grow the amount and impact of video journalism in news and across the portfolio. Our business continues to generate strong free cash flow. In the last 12 months, we generated $542 million of free cash flow enabled by robust AOP and our capital-efficient model.

I'll note that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act resulted in lower cash tax payments of $65 million for fiscal 2025, and that the sale of some excess land at our printing plant generated $33 million of cash in Q1 of 2025. Looking to full year 2026, we expect to benefit from the tax bill of approximately $60 million to operating cash flow. We do not expect the majority of this cash flow benefit to recur beyond fiscal 2026. In summary, our strategy continues to work as designed. Our strategic priorities are all aimed at building a larger and more engaged audience over time, growing our subscriber base, and powering our multiple revenue streams. We continue to expect 2026 to be another year of healthy growth in revenues and AOP, margin expansion, and strong free cash flow generation.

We also remain on the path to achieving our midterm targets for subscribers, AOP growth, and capital returns. With that, we're happy to take your questions.

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask question you may press star then one on touch tone phone if you are using speakerphone please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question press star then two at this time we will pause momentarily to assemble ourselves. The first question comes from Benjamin Soff with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for the question. I wanted to first ask about the digital subscription revenue. It came in really strong this quarter, and I was hoping you could unpack some of the main drivers of that performance. In particular, could you discuss how the bundle category performed given the change in disclosure? This is kind of a follow-up.

Ben, I'm happy to take that. We're very pleased with the performance in the quarter for digital subscription revenue. As we know, you know, looking to Q2 as well, we provide quarterly guidance on that line. What we're, you know, doing there is we talked about internalizing that over the long term is focusing on the function of both our subscriber base and our ARPU. The subscription growth in the quarter, in any given quarter, can fluctuate for a variety of reasons, subscriber mix, product pricing. We're pleased with that result, and looking forward, you see the guide of 14%-17%.

Now as it relates to that sort of the drivers there, ARPU was driven specifically by subscribers transitioning from promotional to higher prices and the impact of some price increases. I mentioned that a bundle price increase on the last call. All of this is part of an ongoing approach to pricing designed to address the whole demand curve based on how much value people are getting from the products. I think the key thing there is multiple products across the portfolio. As we add significant value to our products, we're continuing to see really strong audience and subscriber engagement, and we were really pleased in the quarter with the performance at our pricing step-up points.

Got it. On the ad business, one of the drivers of digital ad growth going back to last year has been introducing new supply on the platform. It looks like you're continuing to get good results from that. Can you share how you're thinking about balancing revenue growth with increasing ad load? Are you still adding new ad inventory to spaces that don't have ads today? Or is the incremental new supply coming from growing ad load on the platform? Thanks.

Yeah, I'll take that one. It's a great question. I'll just say it was a great quarter in advertising, and the underlying drivers of the business feel really strong. I'm as optimistic as I've been about our ad business, and that the real, you know, the biggest driver is we are in big spaces where there's real marketer demand, and we have big and engaged audiences in those spaces. To your point, I'll note that last year, we really benefited from an increase in supply, particularly in the second half of the year, and particularly in games and sports, and that continued into Q1. This year, we will keep adding supply. We'll do it more incrementally, and we'll do it across the portfolio. It's also worth saying, you know, our ad products really work for marketers.

We've got these kind of big, beautiful canvases where you asked about ad load. We're very deliberate about how many of them we put on each page because it's really meant to be a consumer-first experience. That's kind of the magic of the model. That's why the ads work so well. We've got very powerful data now that we've been building for years to help marketers target those ads. They perform, and marketers come back.

Great. Thanks, Ben. Operator, let's go to our next question.

The next question comes from David Karnovsky with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks. Maybe a follow-up on digital ads. Meredith, your results have, you know, consistently kind of exceeded your outlook on what looks to be an accelerated pace. I'm curious, when you look back and you see the outcome relative to your forecast, I'm curious what's generally been driving that better than expected kind of digital advertising result relative to what you had forecast? Like, where is that kind of incremental demand coming from?

Yeah. It's a good question. I'll say a few things. They won't be a ton different from what I just said, but I do think now the sort of structural advantage we've built in advertising is that we play in five spaces that marketers want to be in. Even within news, you know, our news product is a really broad product with, you know, a lot of different kinds of journalism, and there's a lot for marketers there. Obviously sports and games are big. You know, cooking and Wirecutter are really compelling for marketers.

That's kind of the big underlying driver is big spaces, lots of audience engagement in those spaces, really powerful ad products, you know, relative to, I think, what another publisher might be able to do because we have so much first-party data. All of that is working. I'll add two more things, which is, you know, we've been in the ad business a very long time. The marketers who already run with us, who've been with us for years, there's opportunity to do more with them, because we're in so many spaces and we're on, you know, multiple different kinds of platforms, multiple different kinds of ad products. We can get sort of more share of wallet from marketers.

I'll add that, particularly because of games and sports and recipes and shopping advice, we can just bring in more different kinds of marketers. You know, we're really sort of evolving the ad business to be able to do that. The last thing I'll say, because you're pushing on our sort of prediction ability, I've been around our ad business for a very long time. It remains harder to predict than the subscription business, I think, for obvious reasons. We're kind of broadly optimistic about it.

Got it. Maybe just sticking on this topic. You know, when you look at the news flow in March, very much dominated by the Iran conflict, I think historically investors would kind of look at that and say, "Oh, this content is a negative for advertising." I'm curious, is that kind of still the right way to look at it? That, you know, that type of content is a challenge for marketers to put their brand next to?

I'll say two things about that. We really benefit now from having this wide portfolio of products with a lot of audience engagement in each of those products, so there are lots of places for a marketer to be. We did this, you know, kind of step function increase in supply in the second half of last year in sports and games, and you're seeing us continue to benefit from that now. I'm gonna say about news, though, which remains kind of our by far the, you know, most important thing we do in terms of value creation and really important for marketers. News is a big word with a lot of meaning, and it's not just, you know, war and politics. We're super proud of the coverage we've been able to do on the war in Iran.

I called it out in my prepared remarks. Within our news report, you know, we mentioned the 30 greatest living songwriters in America, and we You know, if I think about our, it just the sort of the work we do in science-backed health and wellness or culture more broadly, there are so many other topics and places. We have incredible style coverage. There are so many places for a marketer to be associated with The Times, to work with The Times, but that go beyond kind of some of the things that are less desirable in terms of places for a marketer to be. We really benefit from that.

That's great. Thanks, David. Operator, next question, please.

The next question comes from David Plaus with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks for taking the question. Just on the video initiative, which is, you know, clearly a big focus and investment area, is there anything you can share around early engagement metrics? Is there a certain type of content that's generating outside viewership or certain venues on or off platform? You know, how should we think about the strategy and timeline of monetization there?

Yeah, I'm happy to take that. It's a great question. Listen, the most important thing to say is we see video as a big long-term opportunity for The Times, and what we're really aiming for here is to establish The Times as a preferred brand for watching news and the other things we do in addition to reading and listening. To your point, our efforts here are really meant to grow and deepen engagement with the audience we already have, and also to reach net new audiences. As I said in my prepared remarks, Q1 was a period where we saw a lot of increase to production. That is a big focus right now. We more than doubled the production of reporter video. We've ramped up video news clips.

I mentioned visual investigations, which are really different at the Times and have a lot of impact. I'd say we have a lot of momentum around our shows portfolio. You know, shows covering the biggest ideas in politics on both sides of the aisle, culture, AI. You know, we've got an interview show with very newsworthy figures. We've got a show in shopping. We have sports highlights now. A lot of that is getting real traction. You asked about engagement specifically. I would say we've seen really great engagement with video. It is early. That's the most important thing I could say. It is early here, but we've seen great engagement on our site and our apps, and that includes our live coverage, it includes the homepage.

You'll remember we launched a watch tab in our app sort of across the destinations. We're seeing real engagement from it. It's early days. I think you asked about monetization. You can regard us as sort of thinking about this as a three-step strategy. First, increase production. We've got a lot of inherent advantage there because we've got, you know, reporters sort of everywhere poised to go where the story does, and we're adding a video capability layer to that. We're in a phase of really scaling production. As we do that, we are also building engagement with the audience we already have and net new audience. I think The Times has a very good track record of, as we scale engagement, monetizing, you know, in all the ways we monetize advertising.

Ultimately, makes the subscription more valuable and, you know, potentially even licensing. The monetization sort of follows production and engagement. It's early, but we like where we are.

Great. Thank you.

Great. Thanks, David.

The next question-

Go ahead, operator. Next question, please.

Thank you. The next question comes from Kutgun Maral with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Great. Good morning, thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask about AI licensing. Now that we're approaching the, you know, roughly one-year mark with the Amazon deal, I was wondering if you could expand on how that relationship has progressed and whether your experience with that agreement has impacted your broader philosophy with AI platforms. How should we think about the opportunity for, you know, maybe multiple AI licensing partnerships as we move forward? Maybe if there's any color you could provide on how those conversations are progressing, that would be helpful. Thank you.

Yeah. I'll take that one. You know, I think we've sort of said all along, we're open to doing deals that sort of meet our conditions, which are, you know, is a deal or a partnership here consistent with our long-term strategy? Does it ensure sustainable fair value exchange? Do we have control over how our content is used? I would say we've done a partnership with Amazon because it met those conditions, and so far so good. When, you know, we're learning a lot there. I would just say, like, broadly, The Times has a good track record of doing deals when the terms are right. You know, we also continue to believe that enforcing our rights is really important to ensuring sustainable fair value exchange over the long term.

Ultimately, you know, we believe we make journalism that is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable, at real scale, and that that's gonna be valuable to everyone, the consumers and the LLMs, who need high-quality work, powering their systems.

Perfect. Thank you.

Thanks, Kutgun. Operator, next question.

The next question comes from Cameron Mansson-Perrone with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thank you, good morning, and congrats on the Pulitzer recognition. I have two high-level ones on the video initiative. First, Meredith, you've talked in the past about capturing viewership from linear TV news declines. I'm wondering if you see that as a natural, more proactive consumer shift as folks leave that ecosystem, or what you think you need to do to attract that viewership to digital news and to The Times specifically. Then I have one more.

Yeah. It's a great question. Thanks on the Pulitzers. Listen, we wanna win the moment when something big is happening in the world and people are looking for, "Where do I get the high-quality information on what's happening here, what the facts are, what this means?" We wanna win that moment, and we are endeavoring to do that in every way we possibly can. You know, ideally at our destinations, but in general, that's the aim. The thing that I think we have that you can now see if you are someone who uses our apps or goes to our site is, we can just show you more of the news than we've been in a position to do in a really long time. We do that with many more news clips than we've previously used.

The real unlock, I think so far has been reporter video, where you've got somebody who goes out and, you know, reports deeply on a story. You know, just to give an example of this, David Sanger, who is an expert on, you know, geopolitics, who's been with us for four decades. You know, we go to war in Iran, David E. Sanger reports very deeply on what he thinks the dynamics are between Washington, Jerusalem, and Tehran. You know, we shoot a short video where he describes that. For the consumer, they may get, you know, all they need in that short video, or it may prompt them to go and, like, read the long form piece. What we know that it does is it's trust building. You sort of see the guy.

You see there's a human reporter. You understand the expertise he brings to it. We think it's a really big opportunity. As to where the viewer is now, I, you know, I for all that is said about, you know, cable and broadcast, it still commands big audiences, and we are very interested in being a preferred brand and preferred place for people to see and watch what's happening.

That's interesting. One follow-up on the short form side, which is just I'd be curious for your thoughts on how you view YouTube as either a potential partner, given its distribution scale, in terms of surfacing Times content or as a potential competitor as you continue to kind of get more active in the digital video space.

Yeah. I'll say broadly, you know, we endeavor to have the best possible experience you could have as a news reader, watcher, listener or consumer, in all the other spaces we play in on our own destinations. Actually the, you know, the songwriters project that we did, you know, if you wanted to watch that Taylor Swift video, you came to us in the beginning to watch it. It'll, you know, ultimately be other places, you came to us to watch it. That said, I think we recognize, as we always do, you know, in each sort of phase of technological change, we exist in an operating environment and an ecosystem that is shaped by other big players. YouTube is a very big player, it is a way for us to also build audience and awareness.

We're, you know, we're early here, and we're building audience and awareness for the Times as a preferred place with great stuff to come view. That's particularly important as we have shows, long-form shows. That, you know, where we're early in building audience.

Great. Thanks so much, Cameron. Operator, let's take one last question, please.

Thank you. That question comes from Doug Arthur with Huber Research Partners. Please go ahead.

Yeah, last, hopefully not least. Meredith, I know you don't break out The Athletic anymore. Can you discuss the impact it had on the quarter in terms of digital advertising, sort of disentangling that from underlying core growth? Is there any way to do that?

Never least, Doug, I will say we don't break it out, but I'm gonna, you know, reiterate something I think I've said in multiple quarters, which is we are thrilled to be in sports. There's so much marketer interest in sports. I think The Athletic, you know, is a real source of net new audience. It can be a source of audience growth, and it's a very compelling product for advertisers, and we believe it will continue to be, and it has the opportunity to be an even more compelling product for advertisers over time. I'll point to the fact that we just in the, you know, in the back half of last year added highlights from some of the leagues, including the NFL. It's really early there.

We're in the build engagement phase, but over time, you know We're very happy with The Athletic, as an ad performer, and over time, we're optimistic it will continue to be a big part of the story.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Anthony DiClemente for any closing remarks.

Great. Thanks, everyone, for joining us on the call, and have a great day.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.