The New York Times Has A Growth Stock Problem

The New York Times Has A Growth Stock Problem

Jeremy Berke

Wed, August 5, 2026 at 8:44 PM GMT+3 3 min read

• NYT -14.64%

THE GIST

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There's no free lunch in the news business these days. The New York Times on Wednesday posted a clean beat on profit and revenue, and still got clobbered by the market. Why?

Despite a hectic news cycle with hotly contested primaries, the FIFA World Cup, and President Trump's on-again, off-again flirtation with shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, subscriber growth slowed to a relative trickle over the last quarter.

WHAT HAPPENED

Wall Street now values The New York Times more like a software company than a newspaper. That means even a slight slowdown in subscriber growth can erase hundreds of millions in market value.

Operating costs landed well above guidance as the paper invested heavily in video and ad sales, leaving investors less willing to forgive slowing subscriber growth.

The Paper of Record posted an adjusted operating profit of $155 million, up 16%, on $762 million of revenue, up 11%. The newspaper added about 280,000 subscribers, below consensus estimates of 295,000 and well under the 310,000 it added last quarter. Still, that's well above the 230,000 it added in the second quarter of 2025.

One bright spot: digital-only average revenue per user, a key pillar of the company's subscription thesis, rose 3% year over year to just under $10, while digital advertising revenue surged 21% to $114 million.

Still, the slowdown forced the paper to forecast digital-only subscription revenue growth of 12-15% in Q3, likely below the 14% analysts expected.

The stock fell 16% intraday and is down 9.2% this year.

WHY IT MATTERS

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Subscriptions are the Gray Lady's core business. News is one increasingly small piece of the coastal elitist lifestyle bundle Sulzberger and Co. are slinging across digital doorsteps. Politics is the entry point. The real value comes down the funnel, from garlicky lemon gochujang noodle recipes, Wordle, and stylish work bag recommendations.

After a strong run subsidizing hard news-gathering, and leadership crowing that the 174-year-old paper solved the news, cracks are showing in the thesis that subscription bundles are a silver bullet.

That, plus the fact that LLMs are eating the classic blue links of Google Search, which The Times still relies on to send valuable eyeballs its way that it can sell ads against. CEO Meredith Kopit Levien admitted as much in the earnings call.

"We delivered our second-quarter 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," she said. The loud part being that Google answers your questions with a chatbot rather than directing searchers to newspapers and digital publications. And fewer clicks means fewer conversion opportunities to turn readers into subscribers.

Those effects are felt across the news landscape, as even former digital upstarts like Business Insider cut costs and shed staff to plan for a more intentional, post-Google future.

WHAT'S NEXT

The New York Times, like the rest of the internet, is leaning into video. It's found success in YouTube-ifying its podcasts, like The Daily and policy wonk Ezra Klein's Brooklyn-dad glow-up. It plans to continue leaning into talent, more like a TV network than the newspapers of old where the brand trumps the byline.

Levien also hopes The Athletic, the newspaper's acquired sports vertical, will provide yet another subscription boost as the NFL season kicks off. And the looming midterms are another flash point where the normies start paying attention to the news again.

The bigger question isn't whether The Times can squeeze out another few hundred thousand subscribers. It's whether the bundle still deserves a premium growth multiple in an era where AI answers every question. That's a much tougher story to sell.