The New York Times stays on track to reach 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027

The New York Times added 420,000 new digital subscribers in the third quarter of 2026, keeping it on track to achieve its goal of hitting 15 million subscriptions by the end of 2027. The Times now has 13.76 million total subscribers, the company said in its earnings report released Wednesday.

Almost all of those subscribers — 13.22 million of them — are digital-only. The Times counted 540,000 total print subscribers in the quarter. This time last year, it had 570,000 print subscribers.

A few other highlights from the earnings:

• The Times spent $3.8 million on its ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI during the quarter. In total, it’s spent $36.7 million on generative AI–related lawsuits since it began breaking out those costs separately in earning reports in 2024. In a statement, New York Times Company president and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien referred to “human-made journalism” as one of the Times’ advantages.
• Affiliate and licensing revenue was up, “primarily as a result of higher licensing and higher Wirecutter affiliate referral revenues.” (Wirecutter is trying to diversify its business model beyond affiliate revenue as AI drives down its organic search traffic.)
• In the investor call following the earnings report, one investor asked whether the Times expects subscribers to use AI agents to haggle over subscription prices. So far, Kopit Levien said, “we’re not seeing an impact…[but] we’re continually evaluating how third-party automated tools interact with all of our platforms. It’s just worth saying, we have the ability to permit, to restrict, or to block specific tools.”

• An investor asked about the Times’ video strategy. Kopit Levien’s response in full:
   

  Let me just start by saying, we’ve got really big ambitions in video for The Times to be as preferred a brand to watch as it is to read and listen. This is a kind of long bet that we can grow engagement from the audience we have, and also grow audience, because we’re going to engage new people in different ways. I’m not sure what you’re referring to operationally. We’ve been in a sort of steady state of scaling production in the newsroom of video, and that’s happening in myriad ways. We’ve got a big and expansive shows group, and I referred to that in my prepared remarks, where we’re putting a lot of resource and energy into a growing stable of shows that are getting more and more cultural resonance.

  We also continue to have a big effort on visual investigations, which we’ve referred to in prior quarters and in prepared remarks. I referred today in my prepared remarks to a very big effort in the development of short-form video. We’ve talked about that pretty extensively, so a lot of reporter video. Then also now, we’re rolling out more assertively some short-form video franchises, like the one I mentioned from our fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman. We’ve got another one coming from one of the hosts of The Daily. All that, I would just say, reflects a sort of big effort to sort of harness the investment we’ve already made in extraordinary journalists and journalism and put it into new forms.

  I think you’ve heard both [EVP and CFO Will Bardeen] and I talk about this is a key area of investment, and we expect it to drive more engagement, and ultimately, over time, we expect that to enhance our monetization.