New York Times at JPMorgan Conference: Strategic Growth and Engagement

On Wednesday, 14 May 2025, The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) presented its strategic direction at the 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference. President and CEO Meredith Kopit Levyan outlined the company’s vision to become an essential subscription for global engagement, focusing on news leadership, lifestyle product expansion, and multi-product bundles. The strategy emphasizes increasing engagement and leveraging digital formats, though challenges remain in sustaining growth amid fluctuating news cycles.

Key Takeaways

• The New York Times aims to be the essential subscription for understanding the world.
• Engagement has doubled in video and audio content, enhancing accessibility.
• The company is redesigning its app to personalize experiences and increase user engagement.
• A focus on games, cooking, and sports as entry points for subscriptions and advertising.
• Digital advertising saw a 12% growth in Q1, with high single-digit growth expected in Q2.

Strategy and Growth Plans

• Goal: To be the essential subscription for understanding and engaging with the world.
• Pillars:

- Leadership in news.

- Expansion of lifestyle products.

- Multi-product bundles.

• Focus: Increasing accessibility through video and audio, and enhancing each product’s value.

Engagement Metrics

• Weekly Visitors: 50 to 100 million people visit The New York Times.
• Registered Users: 50 million and growing.
• Video and Audio: Engagement doubled in the first quarter.
• Wordle: 2,000 scores shared every minute.

Video and Audio Strategy

• Video: Increased embedded video content to drive engagement.
• Audio: Automated voice for content and a new listen tab in the app.
• Social Media: Presence on TikTok and Instagram boosts brand equity and traffic.

App Redesign and Personalization

• Goal: Drive more engagement through personalized experiences.
• Features:

- Easy access to standalone products.

- Expanded content in news, culture, and lifestyle.

- New audio and personalized tabs.

Performance of Games, Cooking, and The Athletic

• Games: Focus on communal play and new features.
• Cooking: Easy-to-make recipes and video content.
• The Athletic: Enhanced visual experience with NBA highlights.

News Cycle and Institutional Trust

• Strategy: Resilient to news cycles with a diverse portfolio.
• Trust: Commitment to truth and transparency in journalism.

ARPU and Subscription Strategy

• Growth: Increasing digital subscription revenue through engagement.
• Pricing: Initial promotions with data-driven price adjustments.
• Bundles: Encouraging subscribers to opt for multi-product bundles.

Advertising Performance

• Q1 Growth: 12% increase in digital advertising.
• Q2 Expectations: High single-digit growth.
• Strategy: Targeting engaged audiences with advanced data capabilities.

Wirecutter and Future Verticals

• Success: Wirecutter’s rigorous product reviews drive growth.
• Focus: News, sports, games, recipes, and shopping advice.

Apple App Store Ruling

• Impact: Positive view on alternative payments, promoting competition.

Cost Management

• Focus: Strategic investments in journalism and product development.
• Approach: ROI-focused paid media and organic subscription growth.

The New York Times’ comprehensive strategy aims to solidify its position as a key player in digital media. For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference:

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay. Great. We’ll get started. We are happy to have back at the conference Meredith Kopit Levyan from the New York Times, President and CEO. Meredith, thanks for being here.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: So happy to be here. Great.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: We’ll start with this. So since early twenty twenty two when you purchased The Athletic, you have referred to The New York Times as the essential subscription product for someone wanting to understand and engage with the world. So, maybe using that as a framework, give us a big picture view of your strategy and growth plans.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. That’s a good question to start with. We are absolutely still aiming to be the essential subscription, and I think we are making real progress on each of the sort of three pillars that that underpin that idea. We are advancing our lead as as the world’s best news destination.

We have built and are continuing to grow leading lifestyle products in in really big spaces where people spend a lot of time and energy. And we’ve put those two ideas together in a multi product bundle that makes it easy and accessible for people to come to the whole of what The Times offers and ultimately take part in the whole of of what The Times offers. I’ll say just a couple things about sort of how we grow from here. I think things have gone very well up until this point. And we really see running room in every direction.

We have very deliberately chosen the spaces that we’re in. News and each of the lifestyle spaces for being really big places where people spend a lot of their time. And that makes us really relevant to both consumers and to marketers. And our focus now is on making sure we continue to add value into each part of our product portfolio. We’ll do that by continuing to cover the most important stories in the world and in each part of the portfolio.

We are focused now on making that work more accessible to people in more formats, so more video, more audio. I hope we talk about that. And we are also focused on rolling out new value into each part of the portfolio. We did a lot of that last year. We’ll continue to do that this year.

We have a really robust roadmap in each product. And all of that is helping us continue to grow the engaged audience for the New York Times. And all of that makes us confident that we can continue to build a larger and more profitable and more impactful New York Times company.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay. So on earnings calls, forums like this, you’ve always noted the importance of engagement. Maybe you can just kind of level set where you are right now, both for subscribers and non subscribers, and what is The Times focused on in 2025 to move this higher?

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Yeah. Let me let me start kind of at a high level and then I’ll talk about subscribers and non subscribers. At a high level we have a really big audience for for everything we’re doing. Now 50 to a hundred million people come every week to the New York Times in in one way or another. A third of all American adults come.

We’ve got, I think in the order of a 50,000,000 registered users and counting. We have millions of people who come to us directly and multiple times a week. Those are two things we’re very focused on growing. And I wanna say people don’t just come. They’re like active users when they come.

My favorite stat that I heard in the last couple weeks is that every minute of the day, 2,000 people are sharing their Wordle score. So like 4,000 shares since I got up here, including maybe the Pope. I don’t know if he shares, but I know the new pope plays. So, you know, really, really big audience and a lot of cultural resonance across across the whole of the portfolio. You asked about subs and non subs.

We have always been focused on subscriber engagement because obviously that is what drives healthy retention and the ability for people to feel comfortable paying more over time. We’ll continue to focus on that. I think now as importantly we’re very focused on building prospect engagement, really building the engaged prospect pool. This matters particularly as the sort of information eco system continues to change. And I think we are uniquely well positioned to build that prospect pool, which means getting more people to have a direct relationship with us, to ask for us by name, to form a habit with our products.

And when they do that, sort of whatever happens to the information ecosystem, we are in a position to call them to action, to ultimately ask them to subscribe, to make them a valuable target for an advertiser and so forth.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: I can’t help but think that your comments on the Pope remind me that doesn’t Wordle have a celebrity function now?

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Actually launched Friends tab in the games app, And one of the promotions with launch was you could play with celebrity friends if you were among the first people to to do it. We have not yet gotten the pope to be a And then It’s on the list.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: On the list. Joke. And then just real quick a follow-up. Subs versus non subs. Are are your non subs still primarily engaging on the on web based interface?

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: That’s a great question. They’re engaging everywhere. And to be clear, I am talking about people coming directly, know, people coming to the Times. So coming to our websites, coming to our apps. They’re engaging everywhere.

We love app engagement for subscribers, but they’re engaging everywhere.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Okay. Wanted to see if you could expand a little bit on the opportunity with video and audio on the app or elsewhere.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Yep.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: And then actually let’s just start with that and then I can do a follow-up.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Yeah. You know, at the highest level, why are we so focused on video and audio? It makes everything we do more accessible, makes it more engaging. I would say in sort of each of those areas we’ve got a lot a lot happening that’s that’s worth talking about. In video, you’ll just see if you use the app or you go to the website, you’re gonna see far more embedded video than you saw before just as part of the report this morning.

The coverage of the Menendez, I guess, trial or retrial was was in video. The thing we’re probably doing the most in video where we’ve we’ve scaled the fastest is reporter video. So a reporter giving you like a teaser for a big story they’ve just done which does two things. It gets more people interested in the story in short form. And it also goes a long way to build trust because it says here’s what I did to get this story.

It shows the work of it, which is great. And in audio, we obviously now you can listen to the majority, substantial majority of the times in an automated voice, and we added a listen tab to the app. And I think we said at earnings that we saw audio and video engagement both double in the first quarter. So you know, it is really, really working and I would say across the portfolio, we’ll get into the other products. You’re seeing us just be in more modalities.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Is video something that your journalists are kind of wholesale enjoying, right? I mean I imagine this is an opportunity to kind of differentiate

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: I think I think it it look. What’s what’s the most differentiating thing about the New York Times news report? We in sports and in wire cutter shopping advice, we have these giant newsrooms of professionals, experts who have domain expertise in their beat. We were just talking about the Knicks beat reporter earlier. And to be able to have them kind of present themselves to an audience that is fundamentally good for them.

It’s trust building. And it really is just bringing new people, younger people, more people into the report. It’s sort of virtuous in all ways. It’s also unlike the sort of pivot to video many years ago that a lot of media companies pursued. It doesn’t take a lot of production to put a reporter on camera and just talk about the story they’ve done.

So it’s relatively scalable.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay. And then I think recently I’ve heard you talk a little bit more about the Times presence on social apps, Instagram, TikTok. Yeah. I think historically you’ve kind of more been focused on driving attention to your own platform. Is there any kind of shift in strategy here?

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Yeah. No. I would say sort of how we think about what we do on our own platform and make no mistake, we are scaling video and audio on our own platform and how we think about what we do out in the ecosystem is consistent with the way we’ve thought about it for years. You know, strategically, we want and need to be in places like TikTok and Instagram and YouTube because we’re building brand equity. We’re building an understanding of who we are and what we do with new audiences.

By the way, we have research that says if you watch our videos on Instagram, you’re more likely to come to the times, you’re more likely to have high sentiment of the times. So that’s working. The work is we calibrate that with and then what do you get when you come to our platform and how do we make sure when you come to the times what you’re getting is an even deeper, even richer experience. And I have a lot of confidence that you know in the decade plus I’ve been at the times, we’re pretty good at figuring out that calibration and also clear that we want people to come to our destination, but we exist in an ecosystem and we have to be there to present our work.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: I think it’s a big opportunity for us.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: There’s been a substantial redesign of the core app in the past year. Curious of the learnings coming out of that. You know, how much uptake have you seen for some of the personalization features like the the u tab at the at the bottom.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Yeah. Well, I’ll just say two big redesigns last year. So we redesigned the games app and the core app. We are very happy with both of them. I’ll talk about the core app because that’s what what you’re asking me about.

The point of the redesign of the core app, of course, was to to drive more engagement and drive it in different ways. And we really like what we see so far. If you are on the app now, I would say, you know, look look at the top of the app, scroll to the left, and what you get is a very easy gateway to each of our standalone products sort of by brand. And if you scroll to the right, what you get is the chance to see much more of the news report culture and lifestyle and depending on what’s happening in the moment, great reads or wellness coverage. And I will say that really solved a problem of sort of surface area to get content.

We’re happy with that. Two more things that are different in the app. One of which you’re pointing to, you know, there’s like a new modalities tab so you can listen. Now there’s a listen tab in the app and I’d say we’re just at the beginning on new modalities. And then there’s a you tab where you can have an entirely personalized experience from the New York Times.

We’re early in all of that. We really like what we see so far, and I would just say more to come.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Maybe separate to the four times, Zappi touched upon this a little bit, but there’s been substantial innovation at games, cooking, athletic. Probably separate each of these into its own question, but for time maybe we’ll just ask it all at once. What’s resonated? Yeah.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Well, me say the big idea for all of them is we want to build category leadership and the largest possible engaged audience we can have, period. So that that that is what we are trying to do and what we are seeing so far, and we really like this, is all of those products are now serving as on ramps to the New York Times either because you come and subscribe directly to cooking or athletic or games or increasingly you buy the bundle. So that is really working and I’d say we’re still early in that. And two, all of those products are now really helping us drive incremental advertising, which we’re incredibly excited about. In games, more features that unlock things like communal play, and of course robust pipeline for testing new games.

In cooking, we’ve long been focused on more recipes that are easy to make and easy to find, and now we’re increasingly focused on easy to watch. And I would just say more franchise video programming which people love. In The Athletic, two things. Sports is visual, so we’re building a more visual experience. We have NBA highlights in the app now.

I was thinking on my way in here, probably more Knick fans than Celtic fans. People probably came in, but I don’t know. I’m not getting any reaction from the room, but watch watch the high

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: fans. This conference in Boston First.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: I know. It’s dangerous. Watch the sorry. Watch watch the highlights. Go look at the highlights.

What you’re getting is not just highlights, but a combination of the expert journalism with the highlight. We’re just at the beginning of that, and then of course on The Athletic making it easier to follow the team that you most care about. Team or teams?

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: So, we speak on engagement, it’s hard to separate out the news cycle, which feels quite elevated at the moment, maybe in contrast to what some investors had feared when we cycled past the election. I’m curious, Fred, how much do cycles matter to the times? Is it something that you you obviously can’t plan on it, but do you count on it, right, in when you think about kind of hitting that 15,000,000 sub target?

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: I I I appreciate the question. I appreciate why a lot of people ask us this. I’m gonna give an answer that I always give, and it’s just like proving more and more true, which is we have deliberately designed a strategy and a model and a portfolio to harness demand wherever that demand comes from. And each of the products in the portfolio, you know, drives big engagement at different moments and and for different reasons, and that’s that’s part of the model. You’re asking about news specifically, I’ll just say I firmly believe that there’s persistent demand for what we do in news.

I think what we do in news, I hope we talk about this more, is getting more not less differentiated and therefore more not less value creating for society, for for shareholders. And the times is kind of built for moments, news moments like the one we’re in. We’ve invested very deliberately in a disciplined way to be able to cover the world in all its fullness and multiple consequential stories at once. And that’s what you’re seeing us do right now. And I’m confident that we will continue to be able to do a version of that based on our investment strategy in a very disciplined way into news and each part of the product portfolio.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Coming off the election cycle, I think there’s been questions circling news organizations regarding institutional trust and whether that’s push consumer segments to seek out alternative content, social usually. You know, I assume there’s always some amount of editorial sign ups or cancellations, but how do you as a business think about navigating this level of maybe sensitivity?

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: It’s a great question. I think the the first thing and probably the most important thing to say is that our first and most important job at the New York Times is to pursue the truth wherever it may lead even when that is to uncomfortable places. That is the most value creating thing we can do for society. It is also the most value and has proved time and time again to be the most value creating thing we we can do for shareholders. And I’m really proud of the way we’re doing that.

I think I think you’re seeing that shine now. And I’ll just point to you sort of I think we are living in a world now where it is getting harder for everybody, not easier to find that there’s a plethora of information out there. Much of it very good. There are great substacks. There are great podcasts beyond what we make.

There’s a lot of good stuff out there. In an AI world and an increasingly sort of complicated internet, it’s getting harder and harder to find things that are sort of true and worthwhile. And I think the Times has a bunch of advantages there. One is a brand and now multiple sub brands that increasingly people seek out and ask for by name. Two, I think we’re living in a world, and this may be what you’re getting at with your social point, where there is an abundance of takes and kind of punditry and less and less expert original reporting.

And you know, that is the thing we do certainly and most and kind of foremost in news, but also in sports now and also in shopping advice, our wire cutter reviews, and I think that only becomes more valuable. How do we get more let me just say on sort of trust. Yeah. We don’t take it for granted. I mean you know, used to be we could put out a newspaper and assume we had a trusted brand and you know people who trust us would trust us and that was a large number of people.

One of the big things that we are doing now and I think it is really useful is showing the work to build trust. The reporter videos I described go a long way to people saying, oh, I I get it. The pursuit of this story was fair because I know what the reporter did. The Daily where we have reporters just come on and describe how they got a story has has long been trust building. And even little signals in the product like expanded reporter bylines that say this person isn’t just telling you the story because it’s a take, but they were there on the ground and they have years of expertise to tell you that story.

And I would just say I have high confidence that what we’re doing there and just the work itself is more not less in need. And that there is plenty we can do to build trust. And I think the sort of state of the business, the level of engagement suggests we already have plenty of it.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. So the net result of greater engagement and value is that you’ve been able to move ARPU higher. We’ve seen this for both your bundle and news only subscribers. There is a different dynamic at play though for these cohorts. Maybe can you unpack the strategies a bit?

What have you observed to date? What do you expect going forward?

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Yeah. I mean the starting premise, I’m gonna repeat myself a little bit, but the starting premise to everything about price or ARPU, I guess two two starting premises. One, each part of the portfolio is getting more valuable over time. It’s getting more valuable in two ways. We are actually adding more value in each part or we’re unlocking it through better product features like communal play is a good example of that.

So that’s one. And two, the thing we’re ultimately aiming for here is to sustainably grow at healthy rates, digital subscription revenue, you know, over the short, medium, and and long term. And we now have a very well honed pricing strategy which goes like this. Most people come in at a promotional price for the bundle or as a single product subscriber, which is an inherently low price and or a promotional price. And we use very sophisticated data science that gets better and better as we go to get people to engage more in the product portfolio, potentially engage across products.

And as they do that, they are able to take on higher and higher prices because they’re getting more and more value. And at each part, you know, at each part of that journey that we look at, we’ve been doing this for years now, we like what we see. So we have a lot of confidence in that sort of broader metric of can we keep growing digital subscription revenue at a very healthy rate. Yes.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: And just on the on the kind of tenured news only subscriber side, can you maybe touch on that dynamic and

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Yeah. I mean the the two two things there. One, I wouldn’t make too much of kind of any bucket. It is a strategic choice. We are pushing people to buy the bundle.

You have to work really hard if you wanna

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: buy I can’t find it. Yeah. I don’t know where

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: it I can’t find it to run the company. So you know, you you it’s it’s it’s we’re we’re really trying to get people to buy the bundle and we priced it in in such a way that they do that. And you’re gonna continue to see us, you know, we’re at just under half of the base now on the bundle. We have a lot of confidence in our ability to get more people to to be there. And also, by the way, we are happy to have any subscriber.

Know, that part of the model is we’re we’re gonna get you to pay us something for something that you want and a lot of confidence that we can get you to engage more and pay more over time.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: If we can’t, we’re still happy to have you.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: We’re obviously in an economically sensitive moment. I’ll ask about ads in a second. But as it relates to your subscription offers and when you decide to kinda graduate someone to a higher price, how does a macro situation like that factor into that if if at all?

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Yeah. We’re we’re watching the macro economy and monitoring it like like everybody is. You heard us talk about that on the earnings call. What I’ll say is we have awesome products that lots and lots of people really love and we have a great engagement story in in all of those products. And we are adding value and unlocking value very deliberately in all of those products.

So we have a lot of confidence just in the inherent resilience of those products. You know, kind of come what may. And I would say more broadly as a company, you know we’ve this multi product portfolio that answers to a lot of different kinds of demand. We’ve got multiple complimentary revenue streams, subscriptions ads, affiliate licensing, And we are a healthy generator of free cash flow and have a strong balance sheet. So we feel like we’re sort of built for resilience to a lot of different kinds of challenge.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. So New York Times reported 12% digital advertising growth in Q1, you’re guiding to high single digits in Q2. That sort of answers a question about current state of demand, but maybe you can unpack it a bit what you’re hearing from marketers. But then also, you made a comment at earnings that you think of your ad business the way you think of your consumer business. Maybe just what do you mean by Yeah.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: What I meant by I mean you see in the guide what you know, we call it as we see it about our ad business. So you you saw that both in the performance and in in the forward guidance for the quarter in advertising. Increasingly, we are able to say of the ad business what we say of the consumer business, which is we’re in a lot of big spaces that a lot of people really care about with very big engaged audiences. We’ve spent kind of like we’ve spent years building a pricing model and deploying it. We’ve spent years building data targeting capability, sort of pre generative AI and now with generative AI in a way that helps marketers get at those audiences.

And we feel very excited about the fact that because we’re in not just news, by the way plenty of marketers are still news is a very important part of their portfolio, but sports, recipes, shopping advice, games, we you know are able to harness new kinds of demand and we are able to add a lot more supply. And that just gives us a lot of confidence about the ad business going forward.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Alright, let’s touch upon supply then. It seems like at least some of that is coming from games and athletic. Maybe you could talk to, I don’t know, how much you’ve kind of pushed that so far and how nice is it to have that optionality at times of news sensitivity?

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Yeah. We see kind of real running room everywhere we look right now in in those products. And I’d say to your to your news sensitivity point, plenty of marketers still still wanna be around news and they wanna be around it because it’s deeply engaging and, you know, commands a giant audience. And there are lots of different ways to be around news even very broadly defined. On games, we’ve got a giant audience, very habituated people and we like had no ads in the games app until recently.

So we just have a big opportunity to add supply there. On the athletic, we obviously have added supply. But the more interesting thing on the athletic is we’re getting to marketers we couldn’t get to before. So just new categories of marketers who are now advertising with the Dimes portfolio because we’re in sports. Turns out a lot of marketer interest in sports.

And I would say to a lesser degree because they’re smaller products, but kind of also very exciting. Same for cooking and wire cutter. You know wire cutter is very close to intent. Cooking brings in kind of new pools of demand. So we’re excited about all of it.

And I would say the whole corpus we feel like the whole portfolio gives us real running room.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay, you brought up Wirecutter, sits within your other bucket.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Yep, which we’ve now named affiliate licensing and other.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Sorry. Yes. You have named it. I assume maybe the order is an indication of the magnitude.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Sorry. I feel so much better than I sound. Give me one second and I will answer We’re super excited about Wirecutter. I think we’re eight years into owning it, maybe seven, but it’s kind of gone unequivocally well. And I’ll go back to something I referred to before, but we’ve got probably around a couple hundred people doing deeply researched product reviews.

That is a more scarce thing in the information ecosystem. Deeply resourced, rigorous, independent product reviews. People love that and so we see a lot of we like the performance of Wirecutter and we see a lot of running room there. I’ll give you three ways. One, new coverage areas.

So we launched just a couple months ago skin care which came out to very positive sentiment. Two, we’re sort of moving up the funnel a little bit on Wirecutter and giving people more shopping inspiration. And then three, as we’re doing in every other part of the portfolio, we’re doing more to kind of stimulate direct relationships and getting people to say yes, I want this wire cutter email or yes, I want to engage with wire cutter in this particular way. So a lot of running room there and it’s good to add business too.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. So a couple weeks ago there was a court ruling that Apple will no longer be able to charge a 27% commission on alternative payments in the app. Maybe you can speak a bit to the possible impact at times here going forward.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: We like the ruling. I’d say we are pro anything that allows us to have a more seamless path to getting a direct and a paying relationship. And generally we’re encouraged by some of the decisions we’re seeing now that I think drive a sort of healthy more competitive marketplace.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Is it possible to say historically for someone in the app how they might have signed up versus

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: going to the web think it replicates what you’ve heard in the market from I don’t have much original to say there other than it’s good.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay. We have about five minutes left. Does anyone in the room have a question they want to ask? If you do, raise your hand. No, quiet conference.

Alright. Oh, we have one. Go ahead.

Unidentified speaker, Attendee: Thank you so much. That’s really insightful. Wanted to check-in on how you’re thinking about equity compensation and incentives for executives and the rest of the team. Anything new or different this year? Just give it the macro environment or talent retention attracting new talent etcetera.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Those are good good sort of basket of questions. I’ll say we’ve put a lot of time and care into the executive team and into how we pay the executive team. And I think it’s really balanced and I think it’s sort of shareholder friendly and with a good long term focus. So a lot of incentive comp, a lot of value creation oriented comp for shareholders. So all of our executive team participates in a long term incentive plan and has a significant portion of their comp tied up in that which is tied to value creation.

And I’d say you know, we’re playing a long game. I’ve just talked about the resilience of the business. You know, I wouldn’t expect us to make any sort of near end changes to what we’re doing. We like where we really like where we are.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Perth, on the expense side Yep. There’s a guide five to 6% adjusted cost growth next quarter. Curious on on paid media expense, how you kinda think about that. We’ve seen it flex up a little bit for a couple quarters, come down a little. What of what governs that?

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Most important thing to say about paid media always is that the vast majority of our subscription starts come organically. So paid media is a very useful tool, but it is not the majority of of how we get our subscriptions. And for that reason, it’s gonna and and many others, it’s gonna vary from from quarter to quarter. I have a lot of confidence in our ability to be extremely ROI focused in how we deploy paid media. We get sort of better and better at that.

The tech gets better and better over time and in any given quarter there’s always a bunch of things going on from a demand perspective, even just who’s buying what in the market that drives what we spend. But we take a very ROI focused approach. The model is primarily organic and I would say more broadly to the extent you’re asking me about costs, think we have a really good track record now of exerting real cost discipline on the business and focusing our investment into our areas of strategic advantage which are journalism and product and kinda consistently reallocating resources to the highest performing things so we can do that. And I’ll just say we’ve said now I think in a couple of earnings calls that we continue to target AOP growth, margin expansion, healthy revenue, free cash flow this year.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Maybe a final one from us. New York Times, you’re prominent in news, sports, game, shopping, lifestyle. Any other verticals where you see kind of an opportunity to use your scale and develop more of an offering in?

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: I like the list you already named. And I’ll just say I think that list news, sports, games, recipes, shopping advice has kind of running room within it. You know, I I told you we are building for leadership and very big, very engaged audiences in each of those spaces. So I would say we continue to think there is a lot of opportunity in all of those spaces and we’re very focused on that and focused on our strategy and executing well on that. I don’t rule out that there could be another space.

I’d say the bar is high for a bunch of reasons including we really understand now and have come to know what drives huge audience habit, what does the times kind of have brand, what should our brand be associated with. So the bar is high.

Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Alright, Meredith, thanks so much for being here.

Meredith Kopit Levyan, President and CEO, The New York Times: Nice to be here. Thank you.

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