New York Times Company (The)

Good morning and welcome to the New York Times Company's third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Anthony DiClemente, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome to the New York Times Company's third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. On the call today, we have Meredith Kopit-Levian, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Will Bardeen, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that management will make forward-looking statements during the course of this call. These statements are based on our current expectations and assumptions, which may change over time. Our actual results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties that are described in the company's 2022 10-K and subsequent SEC filings. In addition, our presentation will include non-GAAP financial measures and we have provided reconciliations to the most comparable gap measures in our earnings press release, which is available on our website at investors.nytco.com. And finally, please note that a copy of the prepared remarks from this morning's call will be posted to our investor website shortly after we conclude. With that, I will turn the call over to Meredith.

Thanks, Anthony, and good morning, everyone. Let me begin by noting this is a deeply troubling and complex period for the world, with last month's horrific attack on Israel by Hamas, the ensuing war and devastation in Gaza, and the reverberating global consequences. In this difficult moment, the times plays a vital role. With a century of expertise covering the region, our newsroom has dozens of journalists on the ground and many more around the globe doing the essential work of original reporting and analysis to illuminate and contextualize these events, just as they've been doing for more than a year and a half on the war in Ukraine. Our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world propels our business strategy. That strategy is to become the essential subscription for every curious English-speaking person seeking to understand and engage with the world. Our strong results in the third quarter underscore that our strategy is working as designed. Being essential means creating news coverage and lifestyle products that are sufficiently valuable. They drive audiences to seek us out directly and build enduring daily habits. We believe our best opportunity to build direct, lifelong relationships is when people experience the full breadth and variety of our product portfolio packaged as a bundle. That bundle fuels our growth and our economic success in several ways. First, our multiple products give us complimentary audience funnels, each with the opportunity to meaningfully expand our reach. Second, we see better conversion of new users to paying subscribers, as our varied product portfolio captures demand for a wide range of audience interest. Third, people who subscribe to our bundle engage and retain better as the bundle creates more opportunities for them to discover and enjoy our products. And fourth, we're achieving better monetization of our engaged audiences as the full bundle enhances value for subscribers, advertisers, and licensees. For all these reasons, our essential subscription strategy continues to perform well, and we surpassed 10 million subscribers this quarter. That base of engaged subscribers gives us a large recurring revenue stream, powers our revenue streams beyond subscriptions, and enables continued investment into our competitive advantages, world-class journalism, premium lifestyle products, and the technology that underpins them. This, in turn, enables further growth and value creation. Indeed, we expect the quality and comprehensiveness of our news coverage and the scale and distinctiveness of our lifestyle products to fuel our progress toward our next milestone of 15 million subscribers. Importantly, we expect at least half of our subscribers over the next few years to be on the bundle. That matters because bundle subscribers engage more, stay longer, and monetize better than subscribers to any individual product, thereby improving our unit economics and advancing our efforts to build a larger and more profitable company. I'll turn now to the major contributors to our third quarter results. This quarter, we met or beat quarterly guidance on subscription revenues, advertising revenues, and adjusted operating costs. We added 210,000 net new digital subscribers in the quarter, and the bundle played an outsized role. It was the preferred choice for new subscribers by a wide margin and set another record in its share of overall starts. We achieved that strong net ads growth even as platforms sent fewer casual news readers to us and other publishers. We see our continued subscription growth in this environment as evidence that our investments in news and our wider product portfolio are paying off. and that our strategy is building resilience. We also saw clear evidence that our non-news funnels are increasingly effective as on-ramps to the bundle. In games, our homegrown hit, Connections, is now played by over 10 million users a week, another proof point for the scale of our opportunity in that space. And we grew the athletics audience again in the quarter, reinforcing our conviction in the very big potential we see in sports. New York Times subscriber engagement hit its highest level in the quarter in nearly three years, as measured by the percent of subscribers on our sites or apps each week. This is a testament to the depth and breadth of our news coverage, as well as the ability of our product portfolio to meet different complementary needs. We are steadily improving the monetization of our products with consolidated digital subscriber ARPU growing year on year for the second quarter in a row, as well as quarter on quarter. I'll note that in Q3, we saw the largest ever volume of bundle subscribers graduate from promotional to higher prices. We're encouraged by the retention and monetization signals we're seeing among those cohorts, though it is still early days. Total advertising revenue grew 6% in the quarter, anchored by three strengths that we believe give us long-term advantage, despite near-term ad market headwinds. Those strengths are, one, our high-performing premium display canvases and first-party data products, those of which are unique to the times and emanate from the quality of our environment and scale of user engagement. Two, the fact that we are now extending our ad products across the bundle to attract new advertisers and categories. We're just getting started here and seeing particular success with The Athletic, which grew ad revenue more than threefold in the quarter. And three, our brand's enduring appeal for the world's top marketers who can reach our big and influential audiences through multiple channels across our platforms. The overall advertising results in the quarter also benefited from better-than-expected resiliency in print, which we nevertheless expect to decline over time. On the cost side, we continue to actively manage our expenses. This cost discipline supports our ability to keep growing AOP and free cash flow, which we did again in Q3, even as we continued investing into our strategy. I'll wrap by noting that the successful execution of our strategy reinforces our confidence in the path ahead. Our journalism and lifestyle products have made us the category leader in subscription journalism by a wide margin. Our essential subscription strategy is delivering steadily improving unit economics. And with this foundation and against a backdrop of an ever-changing information ecosystem, We believe strongly in our ability to achieve our financial goals and build a larger and more profitable company. Now let me turn it over to Will for more details on the quarter.

Thanks, Meredith, and good morning, everyone. Our essential subscription strategy is designed to do more than increase customer value and fuel growth. As Meredith just described, our bundle of market-leading news and lifestyle products is also designed to improve our digital unit economics and company profitability in a few ways. First, we plan to increase our subscriber lifetime value over time because of the bundle's strong engagement, retention, and ARPU potential. Second, we expect to sustain attractive subscriber acquisition costs as the bundle converts organic demand from multiple areas of audience interest. And third, we expect strong engagement with our scaled subscriber base will fuel the growth of our additional advertising affiliate and licensing revenue streams. We see these improving digital unit economics reflected in our financial results. Steady revenue growth and disciplined cost management have been driving continued AOP growth and margin expansion. Today, I'll discuss the quarter's key results, followed by our financial outlook for next quarter. Please note that all comparisons are to the prior year period, unless otherwise specified. I'll start with the discussion of our subscription business. We added approximately 210,000 net new digital subscribers in the quarter, largely driven by strong performance in bundle and multi-product subscriber additions. We added more than three times as many bundle and multi-product subscribers as we did in the same period last year. They now make up 38% of our total base, well along the path to exceeding 50% over the next few years. Total digital-only ARPU grew steadily for another quarter to $9.28, up approximately 5% year over year and 1.4% quarter over quarter. Our continued sequential digital-only ARPU growth was driven by our success with graduating subscribers from promotional to higher prices, as well as the ongoing impact of our digital price increase on tenured non-bundle subscribers. We continue to be pleased with the results of the digital price increase rollout. And as Meredith noted, we transitioned a greater number of bundle subscribers from promotional to higher prices in Q3 than in prior quarters. While it is still relatively early, we are encouraged by the signals that bundle subscribers retain and monetize better than news-only subscribers as we step them up to higher prices. As a result of the growth in both subscribers and digital-only ARCU in the third quarter, digital-only subscription revenues grew 16% to $282 million. Total subscription revenues grew approximately 9% to $419 million. Now turning to advertising. Total advertising revenues for the quarter were $117 million, coming in above expectations, with growth of 6% compared to our guidance of approximately flat. The outperformance was primarily driven by better than expected results from print advertising, which was up approximately 5%. Digital advertising came in towards the high end of our expectations in the quarter, growing approximately 7% to $75 million. This growth was driven by strong performance at both the New York Times Group and at The Athletic for our core premium display and first-party data product offerings. The strength in these products helped more than offset softer results from podcast advertising, where we continue to see headwinds. Other revenue grew in line with our guidance, increasing approximately 15% to $63 million. Wirecutter affiliate revenue and licensing continue to be strong contributors to year-over-year growth. Moving now to costs and the progress we are making in driving AOP growth and free cash flow growth. We continue to demonstrate cost discipline this quarter, along with a strategic approach to areas of ongoing investments. Adjusted operating cost growth was in line with our expectations, increasing approximately 6%. Growth was driven in large part by our continued investments in journalism and product development. The strategic investments we've made in these areas have enabled us to improve our operating leverage by broadening our addressable market and fueling organic subscriber growth. Sales and marketing costs were down approximately 3%, reflecting our ability to continue leveraging our journalism and product investments to acquire the majority of our new subscribers organically and improve the effectiveness of our overall sales and marketing spend. We saw improved marketing efficiencies in the quarter, in part due to a simplification of our media programs, which have consolidated much of our media spend to focus on the bundle. The increase in our general and administrative cost growth was due principally to higher compensation and severance expenses and certain one-time items. It's worth noting that we don't believe Q3's higher level of growth to be representative of future G&A growth. As a result of strong revenue growth and disciplined cost management, adjusted operating profit grew 30% to $90 million. Adjusted operating profit margin was 15% in the quarter. an increase of approximately 240 basis points compared to the prior year. We view these results as a testament to our strategy's ability to drive AOP growth and margin expansion over time. This also translated into strong earnings growth, as adjusted diluted earnings per share increased 13 cents to 37 cents. EPS growth was also aided by higher interest income on our cash and marketable securities and a favorable effective tax rate. As of the third quarter end, the company has generated approximately $208 million of free cash flow year to date, demonstrating the strong cash generation of our model. Turning to capital allocation, I want to take this opportunity in my first full quarter as CFO to restate our capital allocation priorities, which remain unchanged. First, to organically reinvest into the growth of our essential subscription strategy in ways that drive value creation and extend our long-term competitive advantage. Second, to return excess capital to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. And third, to maintain the flexibility to consider targeted strategic acquisitions that can accelerate our strategy should we see a high return opportunity. We continue to have a balanced approach to capital returns with a target of returning at least 50% of free cash flow over the midterm. Year to date, as of November 3rd, we have returned approximately $114 million through a combination of $69 million in dividends and $45 million in stock repurchases. I'll now look ahead to Q4 for the Consolidated New York Times Company. Before I do, I would like to note that we have updated our presentation of total operating costs to include special items, which are items that are outside the ordinary course of our operations. As a result of this change, we will no longer provide quarterly guidance for total operating costs due to the inherent difficulty in forecasting these special items. We will continue to provide guidance for adjusted operating costs. And as a reminder, due to a change in the company's fiscal calendar, the fourth quarter of 2022 included an additional six days of revenue and costs compared to the fourth quarter of 2023. In order to provide clarity around our outlook, we have provided fourth quarter 2023 revenue guidance on both a reported basis and an adjusted basis, which excludes the additional six days of revenue from 2022 in the year-over-year comparison. The full details of our fourth quarter guidance can be found on page nine of our earnings release. On an adjusted basis, total subscription revenues are expected to increase 8% to 11%, compared with the fourth quarter of 2022. And digital-only subscription revenues are expected to increase approximately 13% to 16%. Overall advertising revenues are expected to range from a decrease of low single digits to an increase of mid-single digits, while digital advertising revenues are expected to increase low to high single digits. These ranges reflect the ongoing low visibility we are seeing in the advertising market. Other revenues are expected to increase low to mid-single digits. On a reported basis, adjusted operating costs are expected to be in the range of flat to up 2%. With more than half of the year behind us, we believe we are on track for the modest margin expansion we've been aiming to deliver beginning this year. And with that, I'll send it back to Meredith to wrap up.

Thanks, Will. In closing, this quarter's results are further proof that our essential subscription strategy is working. Our unrivaled journalism and market-leading lifestyle products give people many reasons to seek us out at different moments. We believe integrating these products into a single bundled offering increases the value we deliver to customers who deepen their engagement and willingness to pay more over time. And our multi-product, multi-revenue stream model makes us more resilient in the face of an uncertain economy and world and an ever-changing information ecosystem. All of which means that we're well positioned to continue creating value for our readers, for our colleagues, and for our shareholders. And with that, we would be happy to take your questions.

We will now begin the question and answer sessions. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. At this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Thomas Yeh from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thank you so much. I noticed during the quarter that you reduced the promotional rate on the bundle to a dollar a week, which is or was equivalent to what the news only product was offered at before. Can you talk a little bit about just the role of news only over time? Are you still seeing growth starts coming in through the news only product at this point? Or has how you changed the selling strategy and the marketing of the bundle really shifted that

Yeah, Thomas, I'm happy to take that. Yes, as we talked about, we've been testing the dollar a week promotion, which has been so successful on news for the bundle. And we had, you know, as you know, our strategy is to maximize subscriber lifetime value. We like what we see there. And so that is the essentially bringing in the bundle starts on that. You know, if we take a step back, I think I mapped out in the last call, you know, the three things we want to look at are growth in total subscribers, that mix shift to the bundle, because what Meredith and I discussed, retaining better, engaging more, and paying more. And then lastly, sort of the overall growth in total digital-only ARPUs. Those are the three signposts that we look to. And in this quarter, you can see that very much playing out the way our strategy is designed. So we like to see that bundle grow. And we are essentially no longer, you know, marketing news only. We're marketing the bundle for that reason. And so I think you can expect to see the trends generally that you're seeing this quarter play out as our strategy is working and designed.

I'm going to add one beat to that, Thomas, which is that we have a long and good track record of being able to bring people into any of our products now at a promotional price, get them to engage, get them to engage more over time, and then step them up either in one or two or a few goes to higher prices. And you have to imagine in the background, we're just getting better and better at the execution of that, and we like the results we're seeing, and that's what gives us confidence to sort of be, you know, working at all ends of the demand curve here.

Okay. Makes sense. And then, Meredith, you mentioned the news aggregator pressures, and you've been talking about that for a probably at the better part of a year now. Are we lapping some of that as we exit this year from a year-over-year perspective, or do you see further changes developing? Maybe just an update on that would be helpful.

Yeah, that's a really good question, and it's probably been a year, might even be five quarters now that we've been talking about it. I would say our strategy is designed to for us to be resilient to sort of however the ecosystem continues to evolve. You know, the point here is to build products in news and beyond news that are, you know, so good, so necessary to people that however, you know, whatever the ways are to get to those products, people are going to find them. So that's the first thing to say. That's what we're trying to do here. And I think our sort of continued strong results against a clearly stated strategy all year long with those headwinds is evidence of that. I think it's fair to assume that, you know, who knows, but that the information ecosystem is going to keep evolving for any number of reasons and that so much of what we're doing is intended to be able to harness demand no matter what happens.

Our next question comes from... Thank you, Tom.

Let's go to the next question.

The next question comes from David Karnofsky from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Hey, thank you. Will, just maybe following up on your comments before on ARPU, we saw the sequential decline for bundle and multi-product ARPU in the quarter, which makes sense given the net ads. But as you start to graduate early cohorts to interim or full prices, should we start to see some stabilization in this number eventually? And then just on the outlook for Q4, it's a bit wider range than normal on revenue. I think that's due to advertising. Meredith, can you speak to what you're seeing in the ad market and how does the kind of elevated news cycle play into that? Thank you. Go ahead.

Yeah. Thanks, David. On advertising, I'll sort of give you the whole picture. Yes, it is a wide range. And as Will said in his prepared remarks, that sort of reflects. just how much uncertainty there is. On the positive side, you know, we feel very confident that our approach and our fundamental strategy in advertising is working. The core of the digital business, which is premium ad canvases and first-party data, both across the New York Times Group, so news and our other products, and in the athletic, is really working. That's been really resilient. even in a tough macro economy, and we expect that to continue to work, and there's a lot of demand for that. Also, on the positive side, athletic advertising is going really well. You know, the idea here is bring in new advertisers and get different campaigns from existing advertisers. You know, we work across a lot of categories, so we've got real optimism there and we're more assertively extending the product, the ad products to places like games. which I think I talked about in the last quarter, and you'll see that kind of as we move across the portfolio. So I'd say that all feels good. At the same time, I think a lot of the kind of wide guide is being driven by, you know, there's a second war now being fought, and that, you know, can create uncertainty in the broader market and therefore the ad markets. And I would say macroeconomically, it remains a pretty uncertain time. And then there are two places where we've said we just expect some amount of continued headwinds. One is print. Print's really hard to call in my decade here. I would say print advertising is always really hard to call. Did better than we expected in the last quarter. We'll see in the current quarter. And then podcasts, particularly news podcasts. remain sort of under pressure for a number of reasons. So for all those reasons, I'd say broadly we feel very confident in our underlying ad approach and product set, and we think it's really working for marketers, but there's just a lot going on at a macro level that makes it hard to know.

And then on the – The trajectory of bundle and multi-product ARPU, as you note, that is our strategy working as designed as we bring on large cohorts of bundle subscribers at the promotional prices. Those of you who have been following us for a while saw that in news only as well, and certainly we expect over time for that to stabilize and eventually return back to growth. We're not sort of calling that to some extent. This is a period of sort of a rapid shift to the bundle and a lot of effort going into those bundle cohorts. We have a lot of levers at our disposal on ARPU, which the two big ones you've been seeing are the digital price increases as well as over time we're gonna see more impact from the transitioning of these cohorts to higher prices. So that'll take more impact beginning next year. And as we've said, the overall expectation is for that total digital-only ARPU to continue to modestly expand, increase over time.

The next question comes from Ashen Wells from Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I know it's early to talk about 2024 at this point, but can you talk a bit about how you're thinking about the puts and takes for expense growth next year? Is the low to mid-single-digit rate we've seen this year the right run rate to think about for the business going forward?

Ashen, I'm happy to take that. I mean, we don't guide on 2024, but I think it's – Fair to say that, you know, we feel good about our cost, you know, performance, both our ability to continue to invest strategically in the key areas of our journalism and product development while also being relentlessly focused on efficiency and making sure we're reallocating our resources to areas of highest impact. You know, we feel like we're definitely on track to be doing what we telegraphed at the beginning of the year, is to sort of see that cost growth moderate. And that's our general expectation as we head into next year, into Q4 and into next year. Thank you.

The next question comes from Doug Arthur from Huber Research Partners. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks. Meredith, you – You called out the strong advertising results at The Athletic, which was really quite a surprising number. I guess the flip side is digital advertising backing out The Athletic was kind of a push year over year. Was that a bit of a disappointment, or is that the podcasting reference you made? And then I've got to follow up.

It's certainly more the second than the first in the way you're answering it. I'll say, again, remember, we sort of did better than our own guide there. And the thing that we pay closest attention to, even setting aside the athletic dug, is How is core display on the New York Times and within the group doing, which is premium ad canvases plus first-party data? And I would say that remains resilient in the face of a really complicated market. So most of what – where you're seeing the pressure is in podcasting and then just, you know, broadly less money moving around in the market in the biggest categories that we play in.

Okay, thank you. And then as a follow up, I mean, it looked like the investment and expense growth at the athletic was, you know, pretty robust in the quarter. Is that just investment in the marketing? Is it content? Are you hiring people? What's happening there?

Let me give a kind of broad answer. Will, you should provide any more detail you think is appropriate. I would say on the athletic, things are going broadly kind of according to plan. And as we suggested, they would, you know, at the point of acquisition. And where you see us investing, it is in the two things that we think are going to drive the most value on the athletic, which is ensuring that the coverage of is widely appealing and widely seen. So that's a place of investment, and we've talked about that on prior calls. I think the biggest opportunity at The Athletic is to get many more people to know it exists and to read it and to engage with it. That's one, and that's the single biggest area of expense. And so anywhere you'd see sort of increased investment is going to play out there. And then in the digital product and making – you know, creating more opportunity technologically in the product experience to engage people. So I think that's where you're seeing it, but it's all – and a little bit, I'll just add one more beat. You know, the ad business is going very, very well, and there are some number of things you're doing there, less so, but some number of things you see us doing there to, you know, throw gas on that fire.

I might just add one more thing, which is that – you know, the success of the bundle and the growth of the bundle is in part also a sign of the success of the athletic as part of the bundle. And one of the things we are doing is, you know, allocating the expenses from that growth back to the athletic as well. So, you know, as the athletic grows, you're going to see expense growth at the athletic.

The next question comes from Vasily Karasayov from Cannonball Research. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. Just wanted to follow up with a bigger picture question on Meredith, your comments about our pool growth and your confidence in how that will continue. So you did provide longer term goal of 15 million subscribers and I'm sure that internally you also have estimates of what our pool would look like. Now, of course, I don't expect you to share that estimate with us, but maybe you can help us think how to, you know, what are the right sort of directions along which to think what our pool could be. Can it be, you know, teens in teens? Can it be in double digits? And what sort of puts and takes we should be thinking about when estimating what kind of our pool the $15 million pool subscribers New York Times would have. Thank you so much.

Yeah, great. Let me just make a couple of broad comments. Will, I suspect you'll have a more satisfyingly detailed answer on ARPU. On the path to 15 million, you should expect us to really be aiming for more than half. over the next few years of the total subscriber base to be on the bundle, and that has economic benefit in myriad ways to the whole business, not just subs, but you're asking about subs. So, you know, continuing the push to more bundle penetration, both for starts and also for existing standalone subscribers to news or any of our other products. So that's going to play a big role in the ARPU trajectory. And then I'll just make One more broad comment, which is you have a number of, Will, I think referenced this earlier, you have a number of things going on around price rises that so far I'd say we are executing well on. One is bring people into promotional prices, step them up over time, either in a year or across a multi-year period as they engage more. as they realize more value. And as I said earlier, our ability to execute against that, our tech is getting better and better. The AI we use to power that is getting better and better. So that's one. Two, as we get more people to understand that time isn't just the product they came for, and that presents most in news, but we've got cooking, subscribers, and games. subscribers and athletic subscribers, getting people to take the whole gives them more of a reason to pay us more, engage more, and then pay us more over time. We really like what we see there so far. And then three, and this has played a big role this year and I think will continue to over time, we now have a good history of at the point of tenure in news and executed games for the first time and we've talked about doing it in cooking as well and are beginning to do that. At a certain point of tenure for certain subscribers based on engagement level, we can do a price increase and exercise our pricing power. So all of those things, successful execution on all of those things would point toward how we expect ARPU to go up over time as we're growing volume and, you know, bearing down the path to $15 million. Will, what did I miss there?

I think all I'd say, obviously, is over the midterm, the way we are thinking about it is still the way we articulated it, which is essentially modest year-over-year ARPA growth is essentially our expectation with, you know, it won't be totally linear and there are lots of puts and takes and levers, as Meredith described, but that's generally still how we are thinking are thinking about it ourselves.

Okay. Thank you so much.

This concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Anthony DiClemente for any closing remarks.

Thank you all for joining us this morning, and we look forward to talking to you again next quarter.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.