The New York Times: The Empire Strikes Back

This episode is brought to you by:

Visible Alpha. The team at Visible Alpha built a platform to analyze consensus data and financial metrics on over 6,000 publicly traded companies. Rather than having to dig through models one by one, Visible Alpha extracts data from every line item across sell-side models so you can better understand expectations on metrics beyond just revenue and earnings. Try Visible Alpha for free by visiting visiblealpha.com/breakdowns

Quartr. With Quartr, you can access conference calls, investor presentations, transcripts, and earnings reports – straight from your pocket. Quartr is 100% free and includes companies from 12 markets including the US, the UK, Canada, India, and all the Scandanavian countries. Quartr is available for both iOS and Android, so check out the app today.

[00:02:55] - [First question] - What The New York Times is as a business

[00:04:35] - Snapshot of the scale of The New York Times and it’s readership

[00:08:06] - The origin story of The New York Times and becoming a national news source

[00:11:40] - How the business is distinctive being family-run for five generations

[00:15:00] - Unpacking the shift from physical to digital and how it impacted their numbers

[00:20:00] - Course correcting after the first few years of their digital strategy not succeeding as anticipated

[00:23:43] - The cost of sales and the margins of the business and growth levers

[00:27:47] - Revenue differences between advertising and subscriptions 

[00:29:37] - What does their non-digital advertising business look like

[00:31:43] - The biggest levers for growing the topline and bottomline of the business

[00:35:18] - Acquiring Wirecutter & historical M&A performance

[00:37:57] - Other categories and businesses that help build a bigger audience

[00:42:00] - Differences between the Netflix and New York Times subscription models

[00:44:37] - Leaning into world events and politics

[00:48:22] - Macro factors and specific things that would lead to reaching their subscriber goal in the future

[00:51:10] - Mistakes and threats that could negatively impact their goals

[00:55:43] - Biggest lessons for builders, entrepreneurs, executives and investors

[00:58:30] - Learn more about the New York Times; Peter Kafka, Rich Greenfield, Lightshed Partners