The company has set an ambitious goal to reach $800 million in digital-only revenue by 2020.īut while most of the focus lately has been placed on the Times’s success with digital subscriptions, there’s another revenue stream that’s been growing in recent months. On that same earnings report it revealed it had amassed over 2.6 million digital-only subscribers. In its most recent earnings report, the Times stunned industry watchers when it announced that it had surpassed $1 billion in subscription revenue, with subscriptions now making up 60 percent of overall revenue. Though critics were skeptical that readers would pay for digital news, the paywall was a smashing success. But perhaps the most important change occurred in 2011 when it launched one of the most audacious experiments in the newspaper’s history: a metered paywall. In 2014 it released a much-lauded innovation report that identified concrete steps the newspaper should adopt if it wanted to adapt to the changing media climate. In 2013 it finally sold off The Boston Globe to local buyers. Of course, the company’s fortunes eventually changed. The Boston Globe, which the Times paid $1.1 billion for in 1993, had become a money-losing albatross that it desperately wanted to sell, and it wasn’t uncommon for industry think pieces to ponder whether the Gray Lady would exist in another 20 years. Like most other newspapers, it was left reeling in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and in early 2009 it was forced to take a $250 million loan from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim in order to stay afloat.

Things have been rosy at The New York Times lately, especially from a financial perspective, but it wasn’t always that way.

History of the wirecutter