New York Times Company (The)

Good morning and welcome to the New York Times Company's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference operator by pressing star and zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star and then one on your telephone keypad. To draw your questions, you may press star and two. Please also note today's event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the floor over to Anthony DiClemente, Senior Vice President, Best of Relations.

Please go ahead. Thank you, and welcome to the New York Times Company's fourth quarter and full year 2024 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 2023 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 GAAP measures in our earnings press release, which is available on our website at investors.nytco.com. In addition to our earnings press release, we have also posted a slide presentation relating to our results 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. The fourth quarter kept another strong year for the Times, in which we made further progress toward becoming the essential subscription for every curious person seeking to understand and engage with the world. In 2024, we added over 1.1 million digital subscribers, putting us further on the path to our next milestone of 15 million total subscribers. Digital subscription revenue, the largest engine of our growth, increased 14%, and we delivered consistently high subscriber engagement in news and across the portfolios. which contributed to strong increases in digital advertising, wire cover, and licensing. Healthy revenue growth paired with a disciplined approach to investing drove higher adjusted operating profit, margin expansion, and increased free cash flow. These results demonstrate that our strategy is working as designed. Our market-leading news and premium lifestyle products proved more valuable to more people in 2024. That was evident in high engagement across the portfolio, which fueled our multi-revenue stream model and enhanced our durability, even in a dynamic information ecosystem. So we begin 2025 with real momentum, which gives us confidence that we can deliver another year of healthy growth in subscribers, revenue, and profitability, as well as robust free cash flows. I'll turn now to our results in the fourth quarter. We added 350,000 net new digital subscribers in the quarter. Digital subscriber revenue growth accelerated to 16%. driven by increases in both subscribers and ARPU. Our bundle continued to be a major engine of subscriber additions and is well on its way to becoming a majority of the subscriber base. Bundle growth was propelled by our news product and also each part of our lifestyle portfolio, which is a key element of our strategy in action. Each part of our portfolio also contributed to digital advertising revenue in Q4, which was up 9.5%. This was particularly true of games and the athletic, where we have strategically expanded ad supplies. We also benefited from continued enhancements to our ad products and the growing sophistication of our targeting capabilities, such as our AI-powered brand match. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our ad products and the value of our diversified portfolio to marketers, and we delivered them even as some advertisers continue to avoid hard news topics. Revenue beyond subscriptions and advertising increased meaningfully. Wirecutter had another great quarter, including its best Cyber Week sales period ever, driven by new coverage areas, format expansion, and deeper engagement. Finally, AOP grew and margins expanded, even as we continued to invest in our strategic areas for growth, namely our world-class journalism and premium product experiences. Before I close, I'll share some reflections on the year we just finished and our priorities for further growth from here. This year will build on what we accomplished in 2024, which was a standout year for The Times in terms of delivering value to our users. Despite a challenged and changing ecosystem, The Times grew its audience in 2024 and once again ranked first among digital news destinations in time spent per visitor. Our world-class news coverage led on the biggest stories, from the election to AI to the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. And we significantly evolved every product in our portfolio. We relaunched our core news app with expanded surface area for discovery and engagement. We released a new version of our award-winning games app to much success. We continued to expand national sports coverage on The Athletic and also made it easier to follow the teams you love. And we enriched the cooking experience with more easy-to-make recipes and short-form video. As a result, our journalism and products were more essential and more relevant than ever before. Tens of millions of people came to The Times every week. to understand the world, play our games, follow the teams they love, figure out what to make for dinner, and shop smarter. Our goal for 2025 is to deliver value at even greater scale and to be so distinctive that even more people seek us out directly and build daily habits with us. To that end, here's where we'll focus. First, we'll continue to comprehensively cover the most important stories, from the new administration to the economy, from the rapid evolution of AI to the impact of a changing climate, with a world-class team of expert journalists and the deep reporting, independence, and ambition the Times is known for. Second, we'll keep adding and innovating in video and audio to make our reporting more accessible to more people. Last year, one in three visitors to our home pages watched video, and over half of our news report was listenable via AI-powered automated voice. In 2025, we'll go further with multi-format journalism and give people more ways to discover and get immersed in the times. Third. We're focused on making each of our products more valuable to more people and have a robust pipeline of new content, shows, features, games, and other enhancements in store for 2025. And finally, all of that is meant to drive a larger engaged audience for the times. with a particular focus this year on growing the engaged prospect pool for each of our products. We believe those priorities, expert journalism delivered in more formats and increasingly valuable product experiences that appeal to larger audiences, are the way to inspire millions more people to build a direct daily habit with us. And strong execution in each of these areas is how we expect to create a larger and more profitable company. With that, I'll turn it over to Will for further details on the quarter.