On Wednesday, Nov 19, from 1pm-2pm, join me, Hearst Newspapers senior director of new content initiatives Alex Ptachick and Subtext CEO Mike Donaghue for an interactive case study on how Hearst is using texting to drive results. We’ll dig into how Hearst is using texting for breaking news and weather alerts, live sports coverage and critic-led city guides. Register.
Note: If you cannot make the virtual event live, we will send registrants a link to a replay.
Turn gift subscriptions into a holiday growth engine
Gift subscriptions are one of the easiest ways for publishers to grow audience and revenue — but only if your workflows are smart, strategic, and automated. Instead of scrambling this December, use this ready-to-go Gift Subscription Workflow Template to plan your campaigns, segment your audience, and track results.
Why publishers use this template:
Save time planning gift campaigns
Maximize revenue during the holidays
Convert giftees into long-term subscribers
Keep testing and improving every season
Turn gift subscriptions into a reliable growth engine.
How the New York Times won
These days, The New York Times stands as the rare case study of success in publishing — not only reviving a newspaper brand but expanding it into a lifestyle platform with a plausible shot at escaping the news category altogether and competing with the likes of Netflix. That’s a far cry from 2009, when, in the wreckage of the financial crisis, the Times was forced to borrow from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and became the subject of grim prognostications that it had reached “End Times.” (Journalists have never met a pun or a morbid headline they didn’t love.)
That’s firmly in the rearview mirror. The Times now boasts over 12 million digital-only subscribers and more than 13 million total subscribers, with a clear pathway to 15 million by 2027. Its subscription business continues to accelerate, helped by engineering moves like a Family Plan, while its advertising arm is back in growth mode. The bundle strategy — complementing news with Games, Cooking, Sports, Wirecutter, and other lifestyle verticals — has created new ad-friendly inventory that isn’t Gaza coverage. Already home to several of the top 20 podcasts in America, the Times has also become quietly competent in video. The new Watch tab is an experiment in whether it can build an all-purpose information app — something closer to a super-media platform than a paper of record.
The Times’ success is anomalous and hard to replicate. Its management deserves credit for consistently executing through volatile cycles, but it also benefited from the kind of unfair advantages most success stories require. It had a massive, under-monetized brand; a dual-class share structure that let the Sulzberger family think long term; and a newsroom capable of producing the kind of journalism that converts directly into paying relationships. Yet along the way, the Times made a series of deliberate, well-timed choices that offer lessons for anyone trying to build a durable media business in the chaotic Information Space.
What the Times got right is that aligning incentives with the audience leads to loyalty — and loyalty pays. Subscribers don’t just visit; they return daily, linger longer, and actually engage with the product. That gives advertisers something they can’t buy on the open web: a verified, attentive audience. The subscriber data is invaluable for qualifying and segmenting users, allowing the Times to target with precision while maintaining a privacy-forward posture. In the most recent quarter, the Times reported 19% year-over-year digital ad revenue growth, even as print continued its predictable decline.
“Advertising is an essential part of the New York Times’ business,” Joy told me. “Both subscriptions and advertising happen downstream from audience engagement.”
Just as importantly, subscriptions turned the organization into a product company. When readers are customers, user experience becomes a revenue driver. The Times app is built like a modern digital product. The contrast with the UX horror show that passes for many news websites is hard to miss.
The flip side of having a brand as strong as The New York Times is that it’s an awkward fit for an era when individual creators are in ascendancy. In 2021, The Times itself asked whether the paper could fend off Substack. The answer turned out to be that it didn’t need to. Both could thrive. The Times’ model depends less on owning every voice than on creating the kind of platform that gives those voices scale and institutional gravity.
The pat answer Times executives give for their turnaround is that they “invested in journalism.” That’s true, but it undersells the scale of that investment. The Times now has the largest newsroom in its history, with roughly 2,000 journalists — more than any other news organization in America. A generation ago, the existential question was how to pay for the Baghdad bureau. Now the question is how to manage a global editorial operation that produces everything from deep investigations to crossword puzzles and podcasts.
The Times has navigated a middle path in its talent strategy, building franchises around stars like Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat, and Andrew Ross Sorkin without letting personalities eclipse the brand. The Daily turned Michael Barbaro into a household name while reinforcing the Times’ voice. DealBook, Hard Fork, and The Ezra Klein Show are built on individual authority but anchored in institutional credibility. It’s a structure that lets journalists become creators without abandoning the newsroom.
The Times has also won more talent battles than it’s lost, notwithstanding occasional defections like longtime columnist Paul Krugman, who left for Substack in 2023, or smaller departures to independent newsletters and podcasts. The economics of independence are better for some, but the Times offers something Substack can’t: prestige, impact, and an audience measured in tens of millions.
The lesson is straightforward. When talent compounds inside an organization, you create a flywheel that attracts audience, subscribers, and more talent. The New York Times figured out how to let its stars shine without dimming the masthead — an equilibrium most publishers still struggle to find.
Information might want to be free, but that freedom creates warped incentives. Ad-dependent publishers have long struggled with the trade-offs that come from serving two masters whose needs rarely align. When your customers and your users are different, the product inevitably suffers. The web’s ugliest maxim still holds: if you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
Subscriptions have given The New York Times both the product mindset and the financial runway to avoid those compromises. Because readers pay the bills, the Times doesn’t have to chase clicks or overload the interface with monetization hacks. Its ad experience is largely respectful and visually coherent, a rarity in news publishing and on par with the world’s biggest platforms. You won’t find yourself peering through a “content slit” on a Times article, assaulted by dueling autoplay videos or buried in an infinite scroll of junk-recommendation widgets.
“If you just put your inventory in the open and let it rip, you’re going to get exactly what you put in — crappy ads and terrible yield,” Joy said. “Programmatic should be looked at as strategic execution.”
Video is a good example of that long-term discipline. The Times has made expansion into video a strategic priority, doubling its output in the past year and adding a dedicated Watch tab to its app. What it hasn’t done — yet — is focus on monetization. Instead, it’s trying to instill the habit of watching video within the Times ecosystem, building an owned audience before inserting ads. For most publishers, that kind of patience is a luxury; in-stream video CPMs can run 5-10 times higher than standard display.
“We’re starting right now with making sure the core app is a reflection of all of the best things you can get from the Times on any given day,” Joy said.
But the Times can afford to delay revenue because it’s building for behavior. It’s using YouTube and other platforms as distribution while developing a self-contained video strategy that’s about product, not promotion.
The pivot to video deserves reconsideration. Maybe the timing was just off. The energy of information consumption is undeniably shifting from text to motion. For younger audiences, TikTok is used for news by 43% of people under 30, according to Pew, outranking traditional publishers entirely.
Its move into podcasting was the first signal that it could build new habits around new modes. The Daily made the Times a morning ritual for millions and proved that “talk radio,” not long-form narrative like Serial, would define the podcasting era. The Times has since built out a stable of strong franchises—Hard Fork, Modern Love, The Ezra Klein Show—each designed to extend the brand’s reach rather than simply promote its journalism. Ezra Klein now straddles audio and video, a template for how Times talent moves fluidly across platforms.
The next frontier is visual. The Times has added a Watch tab to its app, betting it can make video a regular Times habit just as Wordle and Spelling Bee did for games. The joke that the company is “a gaming firm with a newsroom” contains a truth: the bundle—news, games, cooking, sports, audio, video—has turned the Times into a full-spectrum media environment for upwardly mobile professionals who also happen to lean liberal.
The lesson is simple: make multiple modes coherent under one brand architecture rather than scattershot side projects.
Why TIME’s email engagement is soaring
TIME’s newsletters reach millions of readers every week. But until recently, they were stuck with clunky workflows, limited insights, and flat engagement. After migrating 13 newsletters and millions of subscribers to beehiiv (with zero downtime) things changed fast. Open rates on “Inside TIME” jumped 63.8%. Click through rates across their portfolio increased to 11.7%. Editors now publish faster, with better tools and real-time insights. TIME proves that even the most established media brands can evolve and thrive when they own their email strategy.
On The Rebooting Show, Joy Robins, chief advertising officer of The New York Times, joins me to discuss how the Times rebuilt its advertising business alongside its subscription boom — and what other publishers can learn from its transformation.
Other topics we cover: the resurgence of premium advertising, programmatic done right, first-party data as the new media currency, building franchises around talent like Ezra Klein, Michael Barbaro, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, how The Daily became a template for habit-driven products, the discipline of delaying video monetization to build usage first, the challenges of brand safety in an era of constant conflict, and why she believes quality UX is the ultimate marketing edge.
On PvA, Alex and I discuss how media companies risk losing their ability to make good products mostly because the marketplace had other incentives. Now, with these companies scrambling to shift to audience-focused models, the test will be whether they can keep up with product-driven tech organizations. Other topics we covered along with an Anonymous Banker cameo:
Why business models often work against good media products, handicapping the prospects for CNN All-Access, Brian Chesky as product CEO, media companies are run by financializers like David Zaslav, the myth of AI-driven layoffs versus the reality of managerial bloat, managerial capitalism and performative work, the AI productivity mirage and the absence of measurable gains, Covid-era overhiring and the slow unwinding of tech’s headcount bloat, AI as rhetorical cover for cost-cutting, the cultural swing back toward confrontation and competition, OpenAI’s 100-gigawatt plan and trillion-dollar infrastructure bubble, the AI hype cycle and real-world product stagnation, delivery robots stranded on sidewalks and the uneven arrival of the Jetsons future, Nvidia’s $5 trillion valuation and the absurd inflation of tech market caps, Satya Nadella showing up on TBPN as trade media 2.0, podcasts as the new CNBC built on personality and boosterism, Tim Wu’s “The Age of Extraction” and the rentier economy, Travis Kelce as an activist investor and the dubious value of celebrity investors, AOL’s sale to Italian private equity and call-center capitalism, ad tech’s gray area between extractive and additive systems, TRB collaborator Daniel Kolitz’s viral “Goon Squad” and the survival of craft journalism, Isaac Chotiner’s viral KJP interview car crash and the Q&A as literary combat.
Introducing the Audience Revenue Lab
The Audience Revenue Lab is a collaboration between The Rebooting and House of Kaizen. The Audience Revenue Lab will work directly with publishers as an extension of their teams to assist them in implementing to audience-focused strategies.
We’re combining The Rebooting’s insights into where audience behaviors are shifting and what best practices have emerged from industry leaders with House of Kaizen’s wo decades optimizing subscription growth across industries.
For sponsorship information, see how The Rebooting works with partners.