Donald Trump Is Helping Sales But the New York Times Is Still Struggling

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The New York Times has also seen a dramatic increase in paying subscribers since the election, and that is helping keep the company afloat as print continues to decline.

The newspaper added more digital subscribers to its paywall plan in the last three months of 2016 than it did in all of 2013 and 2014 put together. That's 276,000 new sign-ups in the quarter, and those additions pushed the paper's digital-only subscriber base to over 1.8 million.

Unfortunately for the Times, while digital subscriptions are growing, print advertising—which still generates the lion's share of the company's revenue, although a smaller proportion than in the past—continues to free fall.

The paper's digital advertising revenue is rising, but it is still a smaller part of the whole than print is, accounting for 42% of the total ad revenue in the last quarter. And in some cases that revenue costs more than print does, because the Times has had to add staff to roll out sponsored content and native advertising (which is more labor intensive to produce) as well as video.

In order to get digital to the point where it is compensating for print's decline, the Times would have to add as many new subscribers this quarter as it did in the last quarter, and then do so again in the next quarter, and the one after that, and the one after that.

Reading between the lines of the company's quarterly results, print advertising was a little over $100 million in revenue in the latest quarter, down by about $35 million or so from a year earlier. Digital ad revenue climbed by 10%, or about $7 million. So that means the Times is losing almost twice as much on print every quarter as it is making up in digital subscriptions and ads.

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