Good afternoon, everyone. I'm John Hodulik, a Media and Telecom Analyst here at UBS, and I'm very pleased to announce our next guest is Meredith Kopit Levien, the President and CEO of The New York Times Company. Meredith, thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me, and big props for saying my name correctly, both of them.
All right.
Meredith Kopit Levien. Well done.
Thank you. Took some practice, but, no worries. We've got about 40-45 minutes for Q&A.
Yeah.
I've got a list here, but anybody that has questions from the audience, please, feel free to enter them into the application, and I'll weave them into the conversation. Let's dive right in. You know, The New York Times has seen some good subscription growth in the last few years. How much would you say has been the result of those for the general news environment, versus some of the initiatives that The New York Times has taken to drive growth?
Yeah, that's a popular question. Let me start by saying that, you know, the news cycle always plays a role. We're in the news business. It's certainly continuing to play a role. I would say even with the big fluctuations we've seen, I mean, obviously last year was a historic news year with, like, three giant kind of, you know, just giant stories with the election and a once in 50 years civil rights movement and obviously the story, you know, very scary story of a global pandemic. Even within those fluctuations, it's fair to say that we're living in a heightened news environment generally, and I don't think that goes away.
I think what you're really asking me is how much of the growth is that, this sort of heightened news cycle versus us being able to stimulate it, and I'll say we are getting better and better with every passing quarter and year at putting more levers into our own control. We're getting better at stimulating the growth. I'll say we're getting better in sort of two parts to that. We're generally getting better at how we engage people around news and/or other content. There we're really focused on getting people to come to us for needs we didn't meet before or didn't meet really well before, just getting them to come back regularly.
As an example, we've got more live and breaking and developing news products today than we had before, and those really get people to come back intraday and intraweek, and we've made it easier to follow ongoing stories. I'll just say, because of that work and some other things we're doing around engagement, a slow news day this year is still in many, many cases higher from an audience and engagement standpoint than a really high news day in 2019. I think in general, in engagement, we're pulling levers well and still have a lot more to pull.
On the conversion side, on the customer journey and access model, you know, two years ago, we launched a registration model for the first time where you had to register to read more than a small number of stories on The Times. That had the effect of making what is now more than 100 million registered users addressable to us. It sort of opened up a whole new realm of addressability. With that, we're now in sort of much more regular newsletter contact with our audience and just have many more ways to stimulate them to come back through that. As an example, we've got this giant hit of a morning newsletter. It's called The Morning.
Almost 6 million people open it and read it every day, and many of those people then drop into our funnel, and it's been a steady source of subscriptions. Then the last thing I'll say, that's all sort of top of funnel, middle of funnel, what I've just described. On conversion, you know, we started out with a 20 article meter, then we chopped it at some point on the journey to a 10 article meter, and then we would sort of shrink that given, you know, depending on where we were in the quarter.
Now, over the last couple of years, we've gotten much more sophisticated at applying algorithms and machine learning to sort of dynamically deciding when to ask someone to subscribe, and we do that based on their engagement behaviors, and that has just unlocked a whole new world of conversion optimization. Still a lot of running room there. Those models just get better and better. That's a long-winded answer, but we've got a lot of levers in our hands now and still more to go.
Gotcha. No, that's a great answer. New products, and sort of using some of the learnings to just be smarter about the data you're getting and around user acquisition.
Right.
You know, we've seen some real volatility in the net adds, you know. I would say over the last few quarters. I think, you know, third quarter particularly was sort of 3x what we had seen the previous quarter. Can you talk about what sort of drove that change and what investors should sort of expect going forward?
Yeah. I'll answer what drove the change, but let me take a step back and just say we're incredibly focused on the long-term opportunity. I think we have a very big long-term opportunity. We encourage our investors to, you know, really listen to what we say about that long-term opportunity and track our progress on that. I'll talk about how they should do that, in a moment. I wouldn't make too much of any one quarter because of all the volatility and that volatility can come for any number of reasons. It could be the news cycle we just talked about. It can be exogenous things in the world.
You know, we had a relatively slow second quarter because, you know, thank goodness parts of the world opened back up and we had vaccines available. To your question, we had a really strong third quarter because we had a lot of work on our roadmaps that happened to land in engagement and conversion optimizations in the quarter, much of which really succeeded. For any number of reasons, there can be a lot of noise from one quarter to the next, and I wouldn't make too much of that fluctuation. We don't guide to net adds quarterly for that reason. That said, I do think there's a lot for investors to pay attention to.
We've talked about a TAM of at least 100 million people, half U.S., half internationally, who we think will pay for news. I think investors can ask themselves and us is that TAM forming as we said it would. I think we've got lots of evidence that it is, including back at 100 million that we have 100 million-plus registered users now. I think they should look at and hold us accountable to can we keep growing our net adds strongly sort of year-over-year. I'd say, you know, in the first three quarters of this year, even after last year's historic growth, we're at 900,000 net subscription additions. That's a really good signal.
Are we penetrating the market as we said we would? You know, the last time we put out a public target, we said 10 million subscriptions by 2025. It's 2021, we're at 8 million and change. So well on our way to that. And I guess last, you know, do the unit economics of our digital subscription business suggest that we can build a larger, more profitable business over time? I think there are many pieces of evidence to that. I'll leave it there. To me, less quarter to quarter, more year on year, and are we doing the things we said we're gonna do?
Again, don't want to harp too much on the subs, but you know.
Yeah.
Next year you go into a sort of midterm election.
Yeah.
I think of it from a certainly from an advertising standpoint, as a political year. Does that typically drive, is there some sort of seasonality around the sort of political calendar to suggest that there's enough of a sort of tailwind, that next year probably shaping up to be a good year versus this year?
Yeah. I mean, I would say you can harp away on subs. It's definitely the main idea.
Okay.
Of the business. Let me say broadly, it goes to the point I made earlier that we're kind of living in a time of heightened news. I don't think the world is getting any less complex or interesting. I think there are any number of stories that could, you know, be big in the coming year. Certainly, just to your question about elections, we tend to see heightened audience and interest around elections in almost any scenario. I can't think of a time where we didn't. We have a particularly rich set of tools around elections to help people kind of understand and navigate everything there is to know about the candidates, the races.
We do that, you know, at a you know varying levels of detail. I'll use it as a way to say one of the things I think The Times is kind of differentially good at is data journalism and using often publicly available data, sometimes data we collect ourselves, but to help people interpret what's going on. We're not only good at that at elections, we've been very good at that COVID too, and a number of other stories, but we are especially good at that around elections, and we put a lot of time and care into planning for that.
Gotcha. Can you talk a little bit about, so you mentioned the huge opportunity at TAM, 100 million potential subscribers. You're now at 8 million, going to 10 million by 2025. You know, can you talk about some of the investments that you're making now to realize that, you know, to sort of fully execute on what looks like?
Yeah.
A big opportunity?
Yeah. You know, at the highest level, we're continuing to invest in our journalism to make sure we can cover kind of the range of human experience and do that in a way that's relevant to English speakers globally. We're investing in our digital product and tech to make sure that our audience can kind of get to all the value that's there and experience it and understand it. If I were to be a little more specific about that, I would say in the journalism, we are investing, you know, into the breadth. So we add journalists. By the way, you know, a little goes a long way. Here, we add talented journalists every year. The Times continues to be a place that top journalists want to come work.
Unlike in the entertainment business, you can sort of add, you know, one or two. You can add relatively small number of people on a domain or a topic and get quite a bit of value for that. Also, in journalism, we're investing to meet news needs that we've not tended in the past to be really robust in meeting. I mentioned live breaking and developing news before. That tended to be, you know, you tended to come to The Times for the polished story when something has happened, and you maybe go to Twitter or television while it's actually unfolding, and we're getting better and better at having the means of capturing audience when it's actually happening. We're investing in journalism itself and in top talent and to meet more news needs.
We're also investing to meet more life needs. You know, we can help you decide what to cook for dinner and to divert or entertain yourself with our Spelling Bee and to give you good shopping advice with Wirecutter. Can I say, you know, lastly, we're investing in lots of new formats to make sure people can get to our value, get to our quality journalism and our adjacent content in whatever way makes the most sense for them. Audio has been one of the areas where you've sort of seen the fruits of that investment of late the most. I'll just say, you know, lastly, I think we're just at the beginning of articulating kind of the broader promise of all that together in a bundle.
You know, having an array of value to help people sort of meet news needs and broader life needs as a very compelling proposition at scale to people globally.
Got it. As you sort of look at these initiatives and allocate capital against them.
Yeah.
How do you sort of evaluate the sort of returns that will drive? How should we as investors sort of, you know, judge, you know, and hold management accountable for sort of the outcomes and then really the growth that?
Yeah.
We should expect to see?
It's a great question. I mean, I'll just say at the highest level, we're endeavoring to build a larger and more profitable business. I've said some of the ways investors should hold us accountable, but I'll you know like is the TAM forming? Are we penetrating it? Do we have enough? Are we adding to the value that would say you can penetrate it more? Are we growing at a sufficient rate to achieve what we've said publicly we do? I think we have very good answers to all of that. I would also say, you know, so much of the investment we have put in so far has been about getting to that 10 million, getting to what we put out as a public target.
You know, our answer on the TAM and our ability to penetrate it and what we can be and do in people's lives, we're only getting more optimistic about how we answer those questions. We're only getting more ambitious. As we continue to invest, that is very much about getting well past 10 million, and I think investors can begin to think about that. I would also say, you know, can you imagine many more people subscribing to the broad value proposition? Can you imagine us continuing to show the pricing power we have across that value proposition, as it grows?
You know, you talked a little bit about some of the sort of spending initiatives to drive growth. Can we talk a little bit about maybe the operating leverage in the business? You know, I guess first, when does this business start to really show the operating leverage?
Yeah. It's a good question. I'll say we are already beginning to see some natural leverage in the model as subscriptions grow. It's not always easy to see it because of our legacy business.
Right.
The business is basically comprised of three kind of primary things. We've got a large and growing digital subscription business with favorable unit economics, and I've just described to you in any number of ways that we're gonna keep growing that, and we believe we're gonna keep growing that and continue to drive favorable unit economics. We have a profitable and, you know, very cash generative print product, which produces a drag every year on our overall economics. That's some of the noise in the system that makes the natural leverage harder to see. Then I'll say we also have a high margin, but volatile because of the market it plays in ad business. You know, we can talk more about the ad business as needed and if.
We certainly like it more today than we did a few years ago, but it's in a market where things tend to happen, you know, swings can happen in demand in that market pretty quickly. That's how I would think about it. Just in terms of the natural leverage that I mentioned and how it begins to show through, we've lost something in the order of $100 million in high margin print revenue over the last three or four years and you know, have higher overall profits than we did then. You know, that's the subscription model and natural leverage doing its work.
Gotcha. The third quarter, I think marketing spend was the sort of highest I think you've ever reported. I mean, how do you think about, you know, additional spending there and, you know, maybe talk about your, you know, cost to acquire a subscriber. How have the trends been there and-
Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me back up and just say a couple things first. Whatever we spend on marketing, a little or a lot, the vast majority of our starts come to us through organic means. That's like the first and most important thing to know. That is because, you know, we have a very regular audience of many more people every week than we have subscribers. The model, you know, the product itself, which is the journalism and the software through which people find and experience it, naturally generate an audience. We can, you know, point that news audience to, you know, a growing set of products. You know, we don't have to market. We don't have to do paid marketing to grow. That's really important to know.
I'd say for the starts that do come through paid media, and you asked specifically about the third quarter, you know, we are disciplined in how we approach it. We govern our direct acquisition spend on an internal rate of return, and we only spend if we believe we can do so profitably. To the extent you're getting at, like, what happens from here, I will say that I have said for a long time that you invest into the opportunity and the journalism and the product and the marketing, but you don't have to keep investing in the marketing at the same rate as the product itself. The combination of those two things gets better and better at doing the work. We are reaching that point.
I think we're reaching a point where over time, we can rely less on marketing and you know, specifically, you know, we're seeing the model get better. We're confident that the marketing spend we believe it can be contained.
Got you. Given that, and given, you know, sort of where you are from a technology spend standpoint, and maybe as part of a sort of advertising recovery and the fact that you have this political year next year, I mean, do you feel you're in a position where you can see sort of sustainably higher margins and greater leverage, you know, each year as we look further out?
What I'll say is, again, just to repeat something I said earlier. Ultimately, we're endeavoring to build a larger and more profitable business. We are incredibly focused now on volume and on revenue and sort of growing, taking advantage of this opportunity we do have and investing into that. We think ultimately that's the best way we can, you know, return to shareholders the value they expect. I would say, as we do that, and as you think about just the model that I described to you before with the subscription model that is large and growing and has strong unit economics, you know, you can see how you get to more leverage in the business.
We are careful to say that, well, we don't think we have to keep investing in marketing in the way that we have. We, you know, we don't wanna foreclose the long-term opportunity in journalism and the product in favor of dropping more money to the bottom line. I do think ultimately, we are getting to a place where we can envision a larger and more profitable business over time.
Got you. Games and Cooking, standalone products, each have about 1 million subscriptions.
Yeah.
At the end of the third quarter. How do they fit into the mix? You know, can you talk about the TAM there and how-
Yeah.
you know, where those businesses can go.
Yeah. I would say we're really excited about both of those businesses. I would've said that, you know, four or five years ago, and we're still just as excited. They're both in markets that I think present a robust opportunity. Recipes and Puzzles , you know, games like the ones that we make. I think they both have a lot of running room. I'll say as they near 1 million subscriptions, they've set a higher bar for what else we might do, as a standalone product. You know, they each, I think, help us widen the TAM somewhat. You know, they each play in their own markets.
I don't think that's completely additive to the $100 million TAM we talk about and think about for news, but I think it's somewhat additive and some overlap. I think they help us widen the TAM. They also help us penetrate that TAM. I think that the broad idea of a bundle of New York Times products that can help you address multiple areas of need in your life, we think is a very compelling idea. I'll say, we know that the subscribers we have now that buy more than one product from us tend to retain at a rate.
Right.
I won't say that's causal, but we know that is behavior that correlates and that we think holds a lot of promise about what, you know, many more reasons to engage people in their lives could do for the model overall.
Maybe some, you know, some other standalone products. Wirecutter recently launched. You also have Audio Kids. I mean, how do they fit with Games and Cooking and, you know, just how do you think of the growth opportunities in each of these categories?
Yeah. I'd say very broadly, the bet is we wanna mean more to more people. Important to say, news is today, and as far as I can see, will remain the main idea. It's our best source of audience and daily value and engagement. I've just given you a bunch of reasons why I think that's gonna be the case for a long time to come. But it's also an incredible source of kind of pointing attention and audience to these other products.
It's almost like if The Times is a solar system, news is like the sun, and we've got these orbiting planets that draw life from the fact that we've got this daily thing that many people come to looking for understanding, and we have an opportunity to offer them other things. As I said of the businesses we already have or products we already have, Cooking, Games, very optimistic that there's still lots of running room. Early days of Wirecutter, we're super excited about what we're seeing.
Just to the point I made before about a bundle, one of the really interesting and we think positive things is a lot of the subscribers are current New York Times subscribers who want to add it to their subscription. That's been great to see. Then our bets in Kids and Audio that we've talked about, I'd say are earlier forays to see is there something direct we can build here that could have value in a subscription bundle? Or sometimes the answer is that has indirect value as part of our funnel and part of the way that we bring audience to The Times or just add value to the subscribers we already have.
Got you. Before we move off subscription, is ARPU a lever here to drive subs, or is the ARPU growth sort of locked in from here?
Say what you mean by that.
Do you expect sort of more, you know, whether I think it's sort of thinking about your bundling opportunities. I mean, that's, you know, certainly what we've seen in the other D2C spaces like Disney, for instance.
Yeah.
They're getting a lot of leverage off of putting these products together.
Yeah.
Lower churn, they give a bit of a discount. You know, thinking through that, I mean, do you feel like-
Yeah. Yeah.
You may have to give up some ARPU to get some subs or.
Yeah. Let me tell you what we've seen so far, again, in the context of the promise of a broader bundle. In News, I guess three or four years ago, we started to lead with promotional pricing, much more aggressively than we had done in the past, and then moved through a cycle of, you know, once those people get to a year, can you actually get them to take.
Right.
Full price or an interim price? We are now, like, three to four years into that. That has gone swimmingly. We're very pleased with that. We think we've got the sort of flywheel right of getting people to buy at a relatively low price and getting them to engage, find value, pay more. No reason to believe that won't hold up across products. We actually just did the first sale on Cooking that we've had since we launched Cooking, I think four to five years ago. Paid product. I'm super excited about that. We have been testing. I've talked about this in recent earnings calls. We've been testing different price points for the multi-product bundle, testing it as an add-on and then the bundle itself.
In fact, one of the areas we had not been super sort of focused on or rationally priced in was the all digital access bundle, which included everything and had an irrational price for a long time. We are testing different price points for that now, and we think there's, you know, a lot of room to do a version of what you said, which is to bring people in based on their interest in the bundle and then get them to engage over a longer time horizon and ultimately pay more.
Yeah.
So far, everything we know has told us we can do that.
Yeah. I was gonna say, how granular is your approach or your systems where, like, you can look at the engagement you're seeing from a subscriber and where it's very strong, be more aggressive in terms of raising prices or do it sooner than you would otherwise versus sort of waiting?
Yeah. I'll tell you two ways. I mean, that's a great point. One of them I mentioned a little bit earlier, but let me talk about it in the context of price too. We have gotten much better in the last few years, and you just kind of get steadily better once you're good at it, at applying machine learning to figure out when to ask somebody to pay, right? So there it's less price and it's more not too soon or, you know, they may go away and never pay, not too late, or they may not think they have to pay. We've gotten very, very good at reading engagement signals to sort of pick the right moment to ask them to pay.
By the same token, similar work, we've gotten much better at applying machine learning to deciding where someone at the one-year point should go in terms of price. Should they go to an interim price, or can they go all the way to full price? That's based on engagement signals. Early on, we did that in a randomized way, and we trained models, and now we're much, you know, that's been positive for how to think about revenue retention because the models tell us, you know, who can go up and who may need an interim price or to hold a little longer at another price.
Obviously, I think we've spent a lot of time on subscription business. Maybe talk about how advertising fits into the story and just sort of, you know, maybe the investments or initiatives or just how aggressively you're-
Yeah.
Approaching that over time.
Yeah. I came to The Times a little more than eight years ago to run the ad business. I'll say we like our ad business a lot more today. We're sort of more optimistic about it based on everything we've seen so far about that business. We like its kinda overall character better in terms of meeting demand in a differentiated way. The best thing about the ad business that we have today is that it runs on the same high octane gas that the subscription business runs on, and that is deeply engaged registered users whose data we have a lot of signal from to be able to share data in privacy forward ways with marketers to better target their advertising.
We've been probably two years, two in a half years now building up a first-party data product set. We have a lot of signal for publisher, you know, we're a publisher with even as a paid site, we're a publisher with a very large audience. Very large audience, good reach and lots of signal and a wide breadth of content. There's quite a bit that we know about our readers. I'd say a big part of the growth that we're seeing in our digital ad business is coming from demand for those first-party data products. The great thing about those products is you know, do they work or not based on do campaigns renew and do they buy more of them? We're super excited about that.
I would say that to me feels like a gift that we expect to keep giving because we'll continue to get better at the signals and better at the data set. We've weaned nearly entirely off of third-party data. That feels like, and it, you know, it can be a real proprietary advantage and a very competitive proposition. We also like our ad business because we've got, you know, a small number of larger canvas ads. We launched a display ad product set, you know, probably five or six years ago called the Flex Suite, which were meant to be kind of native-looking canvases that a marketer could do more in, and we don't, you know, cite them at that time. Better canvas for ads, they tend to perform really well.
You add that to first-party data, and in the space we play in versus, say, other premium publishers or content companies, that's a proposition that has really worked so far, and we're excited about its prospects. Then I'll just say the audio business. You know, there's a lot of demand for high-quality audio, and Times has a very big daily show with huge audience, which is great from an ad standpoint. We've also launched a number of other shows that get sponsored very quickly, because the shows are great and differentiated and there's a lot of demand.
Again, do you guys benefit? Again, I'm not as familiar with the publishing business, but do you guys benefit from the political calendar as well from an advertising standpoint? I mean, is that a more of a driver as we look into 2022 versus 2021?
I would say anything that drives.
Mm-hmm.
Repeat engagement.
Yeah.
That's my kind of high octane gas point.
Right. Right.
that slows ads from the same high-octane gas. I'll say something else I think we benefit from. There's been a lot of talk in the market about kind of supply chain pressure.
Right.
I've talked, and our CFO has talked a lot about just, you know, what it means to be a publisher, even a premium publisher with great products in a market dominated by platform scale, and that has felt hard at points. I'll say something that at the moment has proven to feel less hard because our business, you know, we play in many categories, and we've got this very compelling proposition that I just described to you of ads that work really well. The fact that we tend to be an upper funnel business, marketers buy us for brand or for big partnerships, not sort of at the bottom of the funnel, not necessarily to drive retail.
We have thus far been, you know, feels like much less affected than others have described by the supply chain pressures. I would say that we're optimistic. We don't see any reason why that may not continue where we are less affected there. We'll see.
Okay. So how should we think about the print business? You know, the subscription part of the business has held up fairly well, I'd say. Or the advertising has seemed to be more declined. You know, what's in store for sort of the print business, you know, in your mind over the next medium term?
Yeah. You gotta think about the print business in sort of two ways. It's really two different businesses. You know, very high margin, cash generative ad business that has come down a lot in the time that I've been at The Times. I wanna say two important things. One, I don't believe goes to zero, as long as there's a paper, and two, and related, I don't believe it goes to zero because I actually don't think, you know, I came up through the ad business. There's something that a national newspaper of quality, The New York Times, does for a marketer that has yet to be replaced in digital or, you know, by another medium. We've really seen that.
I mean, some of our biggest advertisers in the newspaper now are companies totally born of the digital age, and they buy us because they wanna signify an important moment in the world or a product launch. They've got an important message, and I don't think that need goes away. You know, I think that's a really important aspect of how to think, how investors in particular should think about our print ad business. Almost has like some of the character of like outdoor or aspects of TV that there is something limited supply and that serves a very particular purpose for a marketer, and we're seeing that.
On, you know, I'm not gonna pretend it isn't a business in secular decline and in periods where demand really slows down, the legacy stuff gets hit worse, and print obviously got hit worse in 2020 when the character of demand really changed. On the consumer side, we have an unbelievably loyal base of people who buy the paper and pay a lot of money for it and have, you know, taken price increases for a number of years now. You know, as it gets increasingly complicated to get the paper to them. We do control some aspects, not all of it, but some aspects of the supply chain, and we think we still have a pretty magical product. We want to be reminded of that by a Sunday paper.
We don't think the character of the declines there, you know, that revenue line has been incredibly stable for a long time. You know, even as it, you know, at some point it will begin to come down a bit. We don't think that looks like the ad declines looked. We believe that will happen in a more gradual way. Right now, you know, that's a pretty stable. So far it's been a remarkably stable revenue line, in context.
Right. You recently had a new CTO, Jason Sobel. Can you talk a little bit about his priorities and maybe what some of the progress he's made since he started?
Yeah. Well, we hired Jason. Gosh, I ran a long CTO search, long, careful, slow CTO search, and I wanna say he started in August, so whatever that makes him, like four or five months on the job. We were particularly looking for somebody who you know, a technologist with a very strong mission orientation. We wanted to sort of and a very strong consumer orientation and understood that the thing we were trying to do was to get this digital subscription business to a real scale. He certainly came with that orientation. Particularly he came with it in back-end work and infrastructure work.
He had been the head of, I may say it wrong, but something like trust and safety at Airbnb, and then he also had run, a piece of, if not all of infrastructure there. He was there for five and a half years, so he'd seen sort of back-end work, platform work, infrastructure work at platform scale, and played a very big role in it. He had also spent half a dozen years at Facebook in platform and infrastructure work in the early days. We were really looking for that because when we make our investments into tech, what we are really ultimately investing into is the idea of leverage to come.
Because, you know, when the conditions to code get better and the talent you can attract and retain is able to do their best work, ultimately you can deploy engineers more efficiently across many places at once. That was the focus of his hiring, and that's what he's incredibly focused on.
Does that signal? I think in the past you said you wouldn't have been able to hire on the tech side as aggressively.
Yeah.
I mean, does, I guess, hopefully some of the, you know, issues around COVID starts to recede. You've got a new guy in place to run that effort. Does that sort of mean sort of larger investments in the technology side as we look out to 2022?
Yeah. I think we've already talked about and sort of priced in and what we've described, what the tech investment looks like. I do think it's, you know, we play in the same competitive market for-
Right.
Digital product development talent everybody plays in, and that talent is getting more expensive and, you know, harder to get in economic terms. Based on what I've just described to you, A, we think we've got a very compelling proposition because the work is really interesting at The Times. You're touching tens of millions of consumers on a regular basis. The mission is very, very compelling to many people. Even if the talent sort of person by person in certain places where it's really hard to hire gets a little more expensive, we get more efficient over time at deploying it, and there is leverage to come in that work. That's actually why you do the back end and the infrastructure work. We're, you know, well into that kind of work now.
It's a little bit like I described before, marketing spend. It doesn't keep growing forever. We're reaching the point now where you can really begin to contain it because the product and tech and journalism are doing so much more of the work. You asked me earlier about ROI and sort of leverage in the model. We're thinking about tech in the same way that ultimately when you build well, on the back end and in platforms, that makes you more efficient over time in everything you deploy.
Great. I have time for one more question. Meredith, you've been at the company since 2013. Can you talk about what you think are the most meaningful changes in the eight years that you've been at The New York Times? Then maybe you could look out, you know, to the next eight years. You know, what do you think will be the most meaningful changes, you know, based on, you know, from where the company is now to what it looks like eight years from now?
Yeah. I mean, there's so many ways I can answer that question. Let me try and give you a short answer and say, I think we are a lot more ambitious today. I joined the company in 2013. We are a lot more ambitious today than we were in 2013 about how we can penetrate this market, how many people, what role we might play in their lives with news at the center, but beyond that as well. Even within news, we're very optimistic about how big we can be. So we just feel, you know, the place, you know, runs on a much greater sense of opportunity and ambition. So it's a lot more fun to work here now.
We've also seen the enormity of the impact of quality, independent, original journalism in people's lives. I think the 2020 global pandemic was just such a scary and terribly sad and kind of stunning representation of what quality journalism can do in people's lives at scale to help people make sense of something really difficult going on. I would say opportunity and ambition. I don't know if you said the next eight years or 10 years.
Yeah.
I would say, you know, I think The New York Times, I believe we're gonna mean more to more people, both within news, so we're gonna own more of the news diet for a larger group of people and beyond news in their lives. That's gonna mean a larger and more ambitious business that is, you know, increasing in its cash flow and profits.
Great. Well, Meredith, I think that's all the time we have. This is a great conversation, and we appreciate your time today.
Okay. Lots of fun. Thanks so much.
Okay. Thanks for being here. Thank you, everyone.