The New York Times will hit 1 million subscribers soon

The New York Times is set to reach a 1 million paying digital subscribers milestone sometime this summer, according to CEO MarkThompson, during the company’s earnings call last week.

The Times struggled internally for years on whether it should charge for online content. There were concerns that it could be upsetting the code of digital information, which in essence, was meant to be free.

The paper finally decided and went ahead with a paywall in 2011, turning digital subscriptions into an emerging business that generated nearly $170 million last year, increasing 13.5 percent from the year before.

The issue, however, is that despite those profits, the Times’ digital revenues – circulating and advertising – amount to only a little more than a fifth of the paper’s total sales and still won’t come close to filling in for its once fat print profits.

Even with 1 million paying subscribers, that’s a $190 million to $200 million business, if you add digital ads, it could optimistically be a $400 million newsroom. That’s still not enough to make up for print.

Print is still a billion-dollar machine for the Times, but it is, inevitably, still not the same as previous years. The Times average weekday print circulation currently stands at 625,951 which is about half the 1.18 million it had back in 1994 when the paper was at its daily print peak. And the numbers keep getting smaller.

Most adult readers get their political news from Facebook and this has prompted the Times and other publishers to decide to work with Facebook to post its articles directly to the site. The social network seems to be fairly straightforward in its motivation: to give its many mobile users a better reading experience.