Despite a newsy summer — including the Iran War, the FIFA World Cup, and four Pulitzer Prize wins — The New York Times’ subscription sales were slower than expected during the second quarter of 2026, the company said in its earnings report released Wednesday.
The Times added 280,000 digital-only subscribers between April and June, a drop from the 310,000 subscribers added in the first three months of the year. (The Times now has 13.3 million subscribers in total, “roughly on pace” to hit its goal of 15 million subscribers by the end of next year.) Total subscription revenue has increased to $538 million, with most of that coming from digital subscriptions. In an investor call, Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien attributed the numbers, in part, to the decline of search traffic.
“We delivered our Q2 results against the backdrop of a rapidly changing information ecosystem shaped by a small number of big tech companies whose moves continue to result in less traffic to publishers,” Kopit Levien said. “The Times isn’t immune to that impact.”
Kopit Levien also emphasized that “long-term bets” on video are essential to the company’s continued success. Adjusted operating costs increased 10% year-over-year, in part due to “investments in our video journalism.” The Times hired eight video journalists in January and is currently hiring for 12 video-focused roles. In 2024, The Times experimented with pushing vertical video on its homepage and by 2025, it created a Watch tab in its main app.
“We’re now producing thousands of new videos each quarter to reach the enormous audience for video in all the places people watch, including our own destinations,” Kopit Levien said. “Just this week we launched a Shows tab in our flagship app, creating a new way to experience our long-form franchises in news, opinion, culture and lifestyle…This is all part of our strategy to engage the people we already have more, and engage more people. As we do that, we intend to make the Times as preferred a brand for watching the news as it is for reading and listening.”
Many of the original videos published this past quarter were of reporters explaining their reporting to the camera, which Kopit Levien said is a format that is “inherently humanizing and trust building.” She did not provide specific numbers on engagement, but when asked whether the heavy video investment has resulted in advertising revenue, Kopit Levien said it’s played a “minor role.” In the coming months, she said, the Times will “really focus on scaling production, scaling engagement, and then scaling monetization.”
The Times also said it spent $4.6 million on generative AI–related lawsuits in the second quarter of the year. In total, it’s spent $32.9 million on those lawsuits since it began breaking out their costs in earning reports in the first quarter of 2024.
Read Kopit Levien’s full comments from the earnings call here.
