All right, let's get started. Just a quick note for important disclosures. Please see the Morgan Stanley website, and if you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. With that, good afternoon. My name is Thomas Yeh, a media analyst at Morgan Stanley, and I'd like to welcome Meredith Kopit Levien, President and CEO of The New York Times.
Happy to be here.
Thanks so much for coming on.
A little congested, but we'll push through it. Apparently, you are too.
Yes, we'll work through the cough. So maybe just to start us off, you recently set goals to deliver healthy revenue growth and margin expansion this year, but you also spoke more specifically about a focus this year on growing the top-of-funnel audience and the engaged prospect pool.
Yep.
Can you start off maybe just giving us an update on the state of what you see as the audience opportunity that's ahead of you still and how you plan on delivering that growth?
Very happy to be here, very happy to talk about that. Let me start by saying 2024 was a very good year for the engaged audience at The Times. We talk about why, but we have a lot of optimism about our ability to do that again in 2025, and we have a lot of signal that the opportunity is really there. I'll share a few of the points that we consider. We had 50-100 million people who were using The Times every week. We have 150 million registered users of The Times and counting, still growing. We, last year, for the second year in a row, were named by Comscore the #1 most engaged news site for the second time as measured by time spent. Then I think this one is most important.
Last year, in every part of The New York Times portfolio, so in each one of our products, we grew the number of people who came daily and directly, and you're going to hear me talk about that again and again as a really important signal of engagement. So all of that gives me a lot of optimism that the opportunity is really big. How do we go after it? The shortest way I can say it is we are going to be more essential to more people, and we have four big priorities this year for going about doing that. The first one is probably the most obvious one. We're going to continue to cover the biggest stories in the world comprehensively, and with the ambition and the independence and the quality The Times is known for.
I'll just say there is no shortage of big stories happening right now. Obviously, there are big political and geopolitical stories, but there is no shortage of stories kind of across the spectrum of human experience. We're going to continue to do that, and I keep saying it's like just breathtaking to see how many stories at the same time The Times can be comprehensive on at once. Two, we're going to do that in an increasing number of formats to make sure it's really accessible to people. We did a lot of that last year. You'll see us do even more in 2025. What do I mean by more formats? More video. That might be the thing you noticed the most on The Times last year, particularly more reporter videos. I'm a beat reporter.
I've just written this incredible story, and I'm going to tell you about that story, how I got it, in a short video that you can watch, and that may make you want to read the story, or you got the whole thing there. But more video in sort of all its forms. More audio. The Times is much more listenable now, so you can listen to most of it now in automated voice, but there are lots of other ways you can listen on The New York Times. And then those two things combined, and I would also say in format innovation, we're just getting better and better at live journalism. So covering a breaking news event that's happening in real time, the coverage of the L.A. fires is probably the best example of that. So that's the, you know, crush the coverage, do it in more formats.
Third, we're going to keep shipping more value, new value in every part of the product portfolio. And I could give you an example in each part. I'll just say Games as an example. We have a robust pipeline of new features for each game and also new games in the pipeline, but I could do that for each part. And what all that adds up to is our fourth priority, and the one I bet we'll return to in this conversation is all of that is intended to get more people to, if they're registered users, come back more often, more days a week, to come to us directly. So come to our app, come to our homepage, and to come to us daily or at least multiple times a week. And that's really how we intend to penetrate that audience.
Great. That's a great introduction, and I definitely want to dig into the new formats. But the stat you mentioned in terms of daily user growth was interesting.
Yeah.
The 50-100 million was a weekly user.
That's weekly, yep, yep.
In that context, what gives you the broader confidence in a healthy consumer appetite for paid journalism and the ability to convert a free or registered user to someone who pays?
For news specifically, if you're really asking.
Yeah.
Let me say, just kind of stepping back, there are a bunch of things that would suggest that the sort of consumer demand for news is only going to grow. The people's need for high-quality, fact-based, professional journalism in an increasingly interconnected, complex world is only going up. One. Two, because of business model pressure across the industry for the last 20 years, that is getting more, not less scarce. So the companies that are doing it, of course, The Times isn't the only one, I think are getting more, not less scarce, and I think that becomes even more important in an information ecosystem polluted by slop or misinformation. So I think just broadly, lots of signal that it's going up. Our own experience is that we're seeing persistent demand for news. I mentioned the Daily Direct usage going up.
That is true for all of our products, including news, so more Daily Direct visitation to news last year, really important. I would also say it has not been a slow news cycle since the election, and we've seen strong engagement accordingly. Then the last thing I'll say, and I get asked about this a lot, like how do people feel about news or engaged with news? There's lots of people engaging with news, but the platforms on which they're doing it are changing. People talk a lot about podcasts. We have in The Daily, which is now, I think, almost 10 years old, the number one podcast on Apple last year, was in the top five on Spotify. We have a number of other podcasts that are hugely culturally relevant and have very big audiences. People talk a lot about people getting their news from newsletters.
We have a number of newsletters with very big audiences. As an example, The Morning, which is our general interest newsletter, is read by, I don't mean has an email list of, I mean read by 5 million people every single day. I challenge everybody to come up with one that's sort of bigger and more consistent than that, and as I said, we're doing more of that news in more formats, and if you just look at how our followership has grown in places like Instagram, where we've been for a while, or TikTok, where we're much, much newer, you would say there are a lot of people and growing numbers of people who want to engage with The Times, and we take that as a signal for news broadly.
Last thing I'll say on that, Thomas, is I think we've got a really good track record of innovating around where is that sort of consumption pattern going and then making sure we can deliver world-class, independent, high-quality journalism in that new format.
Understood. That makes sense. So as I think about what you have to offer, I feel like from a consumer value perspective, it's anchored in your brand and in the scaled operations that allow you to stand out during periods of elevated distrust in news. But I do think it feels like anyway, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the country, at least with the last election, seems like it's moving a little bit to the right, and what someone wants from their news outlet is diverging to some extent with what others might be wanting. So in that context, does it feel like mainstream media has become more of a target for growing distrust, and how might that affect your approach in terms of establishing a direct relationship with your consumer?
Yeah. I think it's inarguable that I've seen all the studies you have, that sort of trust in institutions generally and media generally is under enormous pressure. We are not sitting still about that. We're sensitive to it every day. We, I think, have all of this signal just based on our performance. Last year, total audience for The New York Times across all of our platforms, including social, larger than it's been in our history, subscribers growing, engagement consistently strong, very, very strong. That would say the work we're doing is really serving an audience, and that audience trusts us, and sort of the more we can get them to engage with us, the more we can expose them to our work and how that work happens. I think we believe the more they will trust us.
So to the extent that in the first part of the question, I think you were asking me, does anything change about how we go about our coverage? I'll just tell you The Times is deeply committed to high-quality, independent news coverage of the most consequential stories of our time. That does not change.
I think we have lots of opportunity to kind of build more trust into how people take that in, whether that's, and you see a lot of this in the product today, those reporter videos or a reporter going on The Daily to tell the story of how they got a story or how much more visual and real-time we can just make the coverage and show people things, or even an expanded byline where we say this reporter, you know, Apoorva Mandavilli, who's our infectious diseases reporter, has expertise in this topic for these reasons and has been covering it for this long. I think all of that goes a long way to building trust.
I'll just say we are intently focused on getting more people to see independent journalism and The New York Times for what it is, which is good, fair, and we think relevant to a lot more of the American public and the global public.
Got it. Got it. So digging deeper on that engagement part in terms of the growth that you're seeing, it sounds like it's fairly broad-based both in terms of news and non-news. Can you dissect it a little bit between your existing paid user base relative to the broader non-paid user base that you're targeting in terms of the ability to convert those?
Yeah. I think the things you're probably most interested in are subscriber engagement was a strong story all year. We talked about it a lot. Really important because obviously as we grow the base of subscribers, how engaged they are is the most important signal of will they retain? Can we get them to, as they realize more value, monetize even better over time? So we'll always be very, very focused on that. News engagement has been strong, and as I said, you know, since the election, the news cycle does not appear to be slowing down, and we continue to see strong engagement for news and continue to be focused on the thing that grew last year, which is direct and daily relationships. The place where we are focusing even more this year is building engagement for non-subscribers.
So getting people who are prospects for The New York Times and our next tranche of subscribers to form a habit, which ultimately will make them pay, stay, pay more over time. And in every direction we look, we see a lot of levers for being able to do that.
Got it. On that front, I think you've spoken for some years now on your changing relationship with news aggregators as a source of traffic headwind, and I think also more recently you mentioned the AI models as potentially a source of that headwind as well. Can you just give us an update on whether these headwinds are rising, abating, or what the trend line looks like there?
Yeah, I've talked, you and I have talked, we've talked for a couple of years now about audience headwinds from the platforms. I think we have shown that we have really strong levers to contend with that and that our whole strategy has been designed to contend with that and to build resilience in the form of getting more people to, you know, ask for us by name, seek us out, form a habit, come multiple, multiple days in a week. So, you know, there's no question that products like ChatGPT or AI Overviews play a role in those platform headwinds, but I have a lot of confidence in our ability to continue to build those direct relationships and ultimately get more people to come and subscribe to The Times.
Okay. You mentioned the sustained level of news attention and news cycle that's been continuing in the last month or two post-election. It feels like, you know, there's certainly an opportunity there. The variability of the news cycle typically, I think in the past has been an opportunity for subscriber acquisition. Do you feel like this moment is still as much of an opportunity in terms of how you see your ability to attract subscribers as it has been before when the news cycle has been this heavy?
I've said this before and I'll say it again. The model is built to harness demand wherever that demand comes from, and that is in news and that is beyond news and sports and games and recipes and shopping advice. Given the fact that we have been sort of built to cover the biggest stories of our time so ambitiously and in an increasing number of formats and ways that people can take them in, I continue to have a lot of confidence that that coverage and big news moments will be an important part of how the whole system works, including how we build direct relationships, and I would say in addition to that, we also have this incredibly rich and growing portfolio of other stuff, other needs we meet in people's lives.
I would say both of those things, our ability to meet the biggest news moments and our ability to be of value to people in other aspects of our lives, both of those things should help us keep growing subscribers.
Okay. On that point, on the non-news front, you have seen growing success in adoption across, you know, Games, Cooking, Athletic. What exactly would you say is your competitive advantage in those non-news categories?
Yeah.
I guess in other words, I mean, there's no shortage of lifestyle platforms that are available that are targeting consumers. Why has The New York Times Cooking, for example, been scaling so successfully compared to?
I love that question. We don't get to talk about this enough. First and most importantly, I would say that the, you know, authority and the trust, to go back to a prior question, and the sort of standing for a certain set of processes and quality that The Times has built over almost two centuries imbues everything with some amount of that, which is great. And also each of these products being sort of part of and appended to and promoted by The New York Times helps them grow and gives us some of our confidence in their growth potential. But the real thing that gives me the most confidence in all of their growth potential, and I really mean all of them, is that we are doing something in each of those product spaces. They're all big spaces.
Sports and games are particularly big, but we are doing something in each of those spaces that is getting more not less unique, and we're doing it, you know, real scale. You mentioned cooking. We have 20,000 plus recipes in our cooking database, all those recipes. And by the way, that grows every year. All those recipes have been tested and tasted by professional cooks, by chefs, by the people you would want to say this is worth making. A lot of times people will say, "How come the recipes I make from The New York Times just taste better?" I'm like, because think about the number of people sort of fact-checking a news story, and we have a similar approach to cooking.
On The Athletic, we have 550 people just in the newsroom of The Athletic covering teams in a very deep way, the implications of those teams, performance to what's happening in a league, and really able to add sort of insight and dimension to the fan experience. There, you know, that is a really unique thing to be able to go at the team level with that level of reporter. In Wirecutter, we have 150 people who are doing. That's not the whole Wirecutter team. That's just the journalists doing product reviews. So primary source product reviews where they're testing every single product again and again to say, "Is this. It was just Sleep week? Is this mattress really better? By the way, you should come visit us during Wirecutter Sleep Week." Really interesting.
But so it's doing all those things at a scale where it's totally unique. And then we've got 1,000 people at The New York Times roughly working on digital product development, and their job is to say in each of those products and news, how do we make sure that value can get to people? How do we make sure people can sort of see the best of that stuff? And I think that's why each of those products, that's why we have so much confidence in news and in lifestyle products to keep growing.
Is the plan then to nourish these as discrete brands as opposed to an overall offering that The New York Times and The New York Times Bundle has to offer? Like how do you take that approach of building these value propositions?
It's a great question. You know, ultimately we just want more people to have a, you know, an important, engaged, paying relationship with The New York Times. But to do that, make no mistake, our number one goal with those sub-brands is to make each of them category-leading in its own right with the largest possible engaged audience that we can have, because that engaged audience is a funnel into that product subscription, a funnel into somebody ultimately becoming a bundle subscriber, or it's just valuable. You know, I always say like at the edge of the enterprise, you've got someone who for now just plays Wordle for free, still valuable to us because that's somebody we can market other things to and that's somebody we can monetize through advertising.
Okay.
So we want them each to be category-leading in the space they play in and bigger. We're going for bigger in these big spaces.
Got it. Let's talk about that bundle strategy then. I think, you know, the bundle multi-product segment at this point is already over half of your digital subscriber base.
Almost half.
Almost.
48%.
Close. Can you help dimension-wise the engagement and the churn benefits that you're seeing to date and maybe just compare that to historically how that compares with the news-only subscribers?
Yeah, so we are on a path. We have, you know, always projected that 2025 would be the year where we cross over majority on the bundle. We're very much on that path, and I would say what you're seeing here is the thesis really playing out, the strategy kind of in action. Bundle subscribers as an overall group are, you know, they retain better, they engage more. The first is the leading indicator of the second, and they monetize better over time, and we, you know, feel very, very good about that dynamic, and I would say in every part of the portfolio, as I've said, we see room to, you know, get more people interested in the bundle, aware of the bundle. I'll also say just the broader product portfolio in the bundle has been great for advertising.
You redesigned the app recently, I think in service of the bundle.
Yeah.
What are the early findings from that, and what else should we expect from a technology roadmap that has engagement in?
Yeah. Well, I'll just say we did two big app redesigns last year. They both went very, very well. Earlier in the year, we put out a new games app, which is like a meta game. You can see all the games there. You can track it much more easily. That was sort of launched to very, very positive reviews. And then at the end of the year, we launched the Core News app. I'm trying to work the code name for it out of my language. I think I've done that successfully here. We are very happy with that app. I think the most important thing to say about the Core app is that it is the digital experience manifestation of the essential subscription strategy. If you swipe to the left, you can get with real ease to each one of our sub-brands or standalone products.
We are careful there to curate what we think a casual user will think is most interesting on those panels for the sub-brands. If you swipe to the right, and this is like, I think the thus far under-talked about part of it, you get much more dimension in our news reports. The main feed today gives you kind of exactly what it says it's going to. We've got a panel next to it that during the election season we used for the election. At the beginning of the year in January, we had our best of lists, including cultural pointing and wellness pointing, the stuff people care about at the beginning of the year, but it just gives much more surface area to get into other parts of the app. We are very happy with it.
The other thing, if you look at the tabs at the bottom, the second tab at the bottom is listen, and I think that's just a signal of a more multimodal experience on The New York Times. Today you can listen. Ultimately, I think you're going to be able to do in our app many more things. You're going to be able to watch and listen and read and play and so forth, so we're very happy with it. We think it's been, you know, it's a very important part of growing engagement this year.
So as we think about the opportunity to grow that engagement and to harness that demand and that increase in consumer value, you know, translating that to ARPU and price power, subscriber ARPU has performed quite nicely in the last year. I think you effectively guided to healthy growth in 2025 as well. What underpins that confidence is what we talked about.
Yeah. I would say there are three things that sort of make us feel good about the ARPU trajectory. One is, and we're sort of getting at this in one of your prior questions, that everything about the bundle has gone well, including our ability to transition people who take the bundle to higher prices over time. That has gone at least as well as we expected, and it continues to go very well. Second, we've been very transparent about doing this. We've experimented for a long time and in some cases just done it with single product price increases. And we think we have, you know, running room there. And that also gives people a rational choice to buy the bundle. Or if they just love the product, they'll take the price increase on the individual product.
And then third, I would say, and I think maybe this is the theme of our whole talk, each of the products is getting like decidedly more valuable with each passing kind of quarter and year. And that just gives us confidence that we'll be able to engage people and we'll be able to be in their lives in a way where it will feel comfortable for them to, you know, pay more over time.
I do think, you know, you have always been to some extent ahead of the curve on building that digital subscriber acquisition model, deciding when to run promotions, understanding the consumer in terms of when at an appropriate time you might ask them to pay more. Given some of the timing of that, as you think about the last 18 months and how you've kind of built into the bundle as the primary entry point, should we expect there to be any volatility in the size of, you know, the cohort of the bundle subscribers who become eligible for a price graduation at any given time? Or are you expecting that to just continue to build?
Yeah. I would say there are a lot of dynamics in any given quarter. I think the thing to look at is sort of ARPU at an enterprise level. We've said that for a while. And our North Star is can we grow total subscriber revenue, which is a function of both volume and ARPU, and both really matter.
Is there more to be done on the customer journey side of things in terms of the backend decision-making model to decide when to?
Yeah. I mean, listen, I think there's always more to be done. One of the great lessons at The Times is there's sort of always the next thing you can do to keep growing. I'll note two things. I think the products this year, you're going to see them get even more visual, even more personalized, even more seamless in your ability to sort of move across them. I think those things really matter. And the things that happen in the background, like how we manage your identity from one to the other, should just get like more and more seamless. So that's the first thing to say.
Second thing to say, because I think you used the word funnel in there, is I do think we have a very good track record of using very sophisticated technology and data science to know when to ask somebody to convert and when to ask them to pay more and how much to ask them to pay more and, you know, how to target advertising. I think the thing that we will get better and better at, and which is still an opportunity for us as we focus on sort of building the engaged prospect pool, making sure that it's really well understood what happens when you're a prospect to The New York Times, what is available to me for free, and how can I form a habit around that? Because that's ultimately what's going to make you want to pay.
And what do I get after I've done that when I ultimately subscribe? I think we have more work to do there, and I'm excited about that work.
Got it. I want to, before we run out of time, hit on advertising and expenses.
Yeah.
Just on the advertising side, you've talked more recently about expanding the supply on non-news services. Should we think about the growth there from here as tied to increased engagement on those platforms, or are there additional levers on inventory and fill rates that you still think that are an opportunity for you to kind of?
Yeah. I mean, definitely growing the engaged audience is high octane gas in every part of the portfolio in advertising. Definitely. So that's one. Two, we are very happy with our ad product set. It's high performing for marketers. We are not done adding sort of enhancements to those ad products. You're going to see us keep doing that. We love our Brand Match product, which is the AI tool that's really working. First-party data is really working. We still have running room to add supply, particularly in big spaces like Games, where I'd say we're still relatively early. And I'll just say we do that in a very calibrated way because those funnels are doing a lot of different things for The New York Times. So sometimes I get asked, why don't you have more ads in more places?
I remind people, you know, we're in every part of the funnel, like every time a user comes to us, there are a bunch of things we want them to do. We're getting better and better at the data science and the technical sophistication to get them to do that next thing. But I would say real running room in ads. The thing that's been just awesome is games and sports are these giant categories where we have products that have tons of cultural relevance, and there's a lot of marketer interest. So it's been really fun to see the sub-brands grow.
How would you characterize the broader ad market today compared to maybe a quarter or two ago?
Yeah. I mean, listen, I would say I've said this to you before. I'm not sure we're a great bellwether for the broader market. You know, we're larger and wider in our proposition than any publisher I can think of. We're smaller than a platform. What I'll say is we think based on our own sort of products and how well they perform and the fact that we are still sort of getting those ad products into more places on the portfolio and still seeing a lot of demand from marketers to work with The Times across all of our spaces. We feel good. You know, we gave a guide for Q1, which we feel good about. And we feel good in general about advertising, digital advertising ultimately being an important growth driver.
Got it. Okay. I wanted to quickly touch on your view about the marketing expenses, which I think was a particular emphasis on the quarter that people were focused on a little bit more. You have been clear in the past about the vast majority of paid subscribers starting organically. There was also a healthy step up in marketing spend nonetheless in the last two quarters, and perhaps maybe less of a corresponding subscriber growth than maybe some might have expected. Can you help us think through just the framework on marketing efforts and what it's meant to achieve across your different areas of the customer funnel?
Yeah. Most important thing to say is we have long had a model where the majority of our starts, significant majority of our subscription starts come organically. They don't come from paid media. And we believe that will very much continue to be the case. And we've also said that in any given quarter or period, we might see an opportunity for high return marketing, and we will spend into that opportunity. In any given quarter, you've seen us do this, you know, in past years. We might have brand work in the market or some different kind of work in the market. Other thing I'd say is we feel good about the performance in the quarter and sort of what we did with marketing. I wouldn't necessarily correlate marketing spend perfectly with net adds.
There are a lot of dynamics that happen in any given quarter that drive those net adds, although we were happy with the net adds performance in quarter two, but I would say, you know, you might have more or fewer product interventions that drive growth in a given quarter. You might have a certain merchandising program in a quarter or not, and then not every dollar we spend, even on non-brand marketing, pays back immediately in the quarter, particularly as I described to you that we're really trying to build the engaged prospect pool.
Okay. Got it. Last one, if I could squeeze it in. Just in terms of the new formats that you talked about and, you know, innovating into video and audio. Audio, I do believe you have spent some time now kind of building.
Yeah. It's been a long time. Yeah.
Maybe help just frame that in the context. Where you might start to see the benefit as it relates to, you know, engagement in the core paid subscriber base or expansion of the top of funnel audience. And then in the broader context of your expense growth outlook, do we need to see an acceleration in core content expenses to support this investment? If not, you know, where might some other areas start to slow?
Yeah. Let me start on the last, on the last part of the question, which is what does it mean economically for us to be investing into continuous format innovation? I think you heard us say on the full year call that we were aiming for 2025 to be another year of revenue growth and AOP growth and margin expansion and strong free cash flow. So I think that that speaks for itself. I also think we have a very good track record now, sort of thoughtful investment and a good track record of knowing where to put that investment to drive real short, medium, and long-term growth in the business. And we also feel very good that we've got our arms around where we can continue to wring efficiency out of the business. And we are not shy about doing that.
Places like G&A, we have been running in a sort of an increasingly disciplined way, and there are constantly things. We still have a legacy business that we're turning off. On the first part of your question, what does format innovation actually buy you? I would say more the ability to show people things or, you know, have reporters on camera talking to people. I think it brings in new audiences. I mentioned Instagram and TikTok. We're doing that out in the wild. We are also doing that on our own platform, and I think we are answering to a generation of people who want to take in news that way, and I feel very, very good about it. I think it also, you're not asking about this, but I'll say, is a trust signal and an important brand signal.
How do we get more people to see The New York Times as good and fair and relevant to them? We explain what it means to be doing reporting and what happens in that process, and we have a human being with expertise actually explain that, a professional reporter, so we're excited about that, and then lastly, it's all good for engagement. I mean, you know, it's great that you can read The New York Times. People still read. They still read really long articles. They read short articles, but even better if you can read and you can listen and you can watch and you can do all that in the same platform.
Great. Well, we're out of time. Thank you so much for being here.
Nice to see you. Thanks for having me.