(Reuters) -The New York Times Co surpassed fourth-quarter revenue estimates on Wednesday, benefiting from an influx of digital subscribers consuming news around the holiday season and the Omicron variant.
The 170-year-old newspaper has become a beacon for the industry by successfully shifting to a subscription-first business model that has made up for steep declines in advertising and print readership.
Its digital subscriber base swelled by more than a million last year as people read up on the Afghanistan crisis and the still-raging pandemic and turned to its rich library of games and cooking recipes.
In the last three months of 2021, The Times added 375,000 digital subscribers.
That brought the Gray Lady closer to its target of 10 million subscribers by 2025, a goal it hopes would be help achieved by its purchase of popular daily word puzzle Wordle and the $550 million acquisition of sports website The Athletic.
Total revenue rose 16.7% to $594.2 million in the quarter, compared with the average analyst estimate of $578.9 million, according to Refinitiv data.
Net income attributable to common stockholders rose to $69,889, or 41 cents per share, from $10,009, or 6 cents per share, a year earlier.
(Reporting by Eva Mathews in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni)
