How The New York Times is betting on a new family plan to grow its digital subscriber base and revenue

The New York Times will begin offering a family subscription on Monday, allowing up to four people (they can be friends, too) to join one plan to get access to news and non-news products (such as Games, Cooking and The Athletic). It costs $30, $5 more than an All Access subscription to the Times. Existing subscribers can also upgrade to this plan.

Subscription bundles have been the driving force behind The New York Times’ digital subscription growth. In a recent earnings call, New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said at least 50% of its subscribers are paying for a bundled subscription or for multiple product subscriptions, “which is important because those subscribers engage more, stay longer and pay more over time,” she said.

The Times added 230,000 net new digital subscribers in the second quarter of 2025, bringing its total subscriber base to 11.9 million — over a million more subscribers than it had the same quarter last year. Its total digital-only average revenue per user (ARPU) grew 3.2% year over year to $9.64, and bundle and multi-product ARPU increased 4.7% year over year.

Obtain more revenue per subscriber

For the new family plan, each user receives their own login so they can save their own articles, recipes, shopping guides and game stats. They can also subscribe to newsletters and follow sports teams. The family subscription is not unlike family plans offered by streaming and music apps like Netflix and Spotify.

“Family subscriptions in many ways is the biggest change to our subscription structure in a number of years,” Cotton said.

The Times is also offering a family plan for up to four people around its Games product for $10 a month, $4 more than an individual Games subscription.

This strategy could help grow the Times’ registrations — especially with younger audiences who might not want to pay for their own subscription but would join a family plan, noted Matt Lindsay, CEO and founder of Mather Economics, a firm that helps publishers develop consumer revenue strategies.

Registered users can also be monetized in other ways, using profile data to serve them targeted advertising or personalized shopping guides, Lindsay added. The Times has 150 million registered users.

The family plan drives more revenue when subscribers upgrade to this plan rather than a singular subscription.

Cotton said the Times has found that the best ways to get subscribers to upgrade to the bundle is to add value by adding more products to the offering, and give a “good deal” to try out the bundle before stepping subscribers up to the higher-priced offering, as well as raising prices over time, Cotton said.

Over the past few years, the Times has added non-news products like Cooking (recipes), Wirecutter (shopping guides) Games and The Athletic (sports) to beef up its bundled digital subscription offering.

Broaden the subscriber base

The new subscription offering can bring in new subscribers invited to join the plan by a friend or family member.

The Times’ new offering is part of its broader strategic goal to reach 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027 — as well subscription bundles with other publishers, like a recent one between the Times and The Economist in the U.K.

“The Times is probably betting this will grow incremental subscriptions that they wouldn’t otherwise get,” Lindsay said.

The risk with offering this new subscription tier is cannibalization. Existing subscribers might cancel and join a family plan instead. 

But Cotton said in tests and modeling, this will likely be a “relatively small thing compared to the benefits.” But it will be something the Times will continue to monitor, he added.

The biggest challenge to getting to that 15 million milestone is “the exact thing that we did to get the last 100 subscribers, might not be the thing to get the next 100 subscribers,” Cotton said. That means every year or so, the Times has to find new ways to reach new subscribers.

That also means doing away with strategies that aren’t necessarily working. Next month, The New York Times is sunsetting its standalone audio app, which it launched in May 2023. In a Times staff memo shared with Digiday, chief product officer Alex Hardiman and deputy managing editor Sam Dolnick said audio programming was becoming so core to the Times’ coverage that it was being folded into its main news app. Engagement with both video and audio in the news app has almost doubled over the past year, they wrote.

“Unifying all of our storytelling formats into the news app is fundamental to our essential subscription strategy, making our journalism more accessible to more people,” they wrote.

Cotton declined to comment on whether this decision was also driven by not enough subscribers using the audio app.

Retain existing subscribers

Finally, the family subscription is aimed at improving retention. 

“We think that a subscriber who has three other people on a family subscription is much less likely to cancel than someone who’s subscribed just for themselves, because if you think about it, that means you’re not just canceling on yourself, you’re canceling access for three other people at the same time,” Cotton said.

Cotton declined to share the Times’ churn rates, but said they are “healthy.” Key to managing churn is creating engaging products that readers see the value of paying for again and again, but also keeping them engaged with those products multiple times a week or day — ideally with more than one Times product, he added. 

“We produce a lot of journalism every day. We have a number of games now. We have a lot of recipes,” Cotton said. “We are always trying to find things that subscribers might have missed, that they might be interested in, to reach out to them with.”