The New York Times has agreed to buy subscription-based sports site the Athletic for $550m (£400m) in cash, as the 170-year-old newspaper adds more digital content to grab subscribers.
Founded in 2016, the Athletic had 1.2 million subscribers as of December, and covers more than 200 clubs and teams in the US and around the world.
“Acquiring the Athletic puts us in a position to be a global leader in sports journalism,” said NYT CEO Meredith on Thursday.
The deal shows NYT’s push towards a subscription-first model, which has become a growing trend across the media industry, as the newspaper struggles with steep declines in advertising and print readership.
In the last three years, the company said it has added more than 8 million paid subscriptions across digital and print products. He said the NYT hoped that the Athletic deal would help it to its goal of more than 10 million subscriptions. Immediately add to the newspaper’s revenue growth.
Athletic will operate as a separate unit of the company and its founders, Alex Mather and Adam, will stay on with the NYT after the acquisition.
Athletic launched its UK operation in 2019, with subscribers paying £4.99 a month for access to sports news stories, long read and feature articles.
Since expanding to the UK, the outlet has moved to poach a number of established football writers, with a correspondent assigned to each Premier League football club.
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The New York Times has agreed to buy subscription-based sports site the Athletic for $550m (£400m) in cash, as the 170-year-old newspaper adds more digital content to grab subscribers.
The New York Times Co. is buying sports site The Athletic for $550 million, drilling down on subscriptions as the newspaper print ads ...
The New York Times Co. is buying sports news site The Athletic for $550 million, the latest move in its strategy to expand its audience of paying subscribers as the newspaper print ads business fades. The Times, unlike many local news outlets, thrived in the past several years. It gained millions of subscribers during the Trump presidency and the pandemic, keeping it on track for its previously stated goal of 10 million by 2025. As of the most recent quarter, the Times had nearly 8.4 million. It has been diversifying its coverage with lifestyle advice, games and recipes, helping it counter a pullback from the politics-driven news traffic boom of 2020. “We are now in pursuit of a goal meaningfully larger than 10 million subscriptions and believe The Athletic will enable us to expand our addressable market of potential subscribers,” said New York Times Co. CEO Meredith in a news release Thursday. It’s one of the Times’ largest-ever acquisitions. The company spent $1.1 billion on the Boston Globe in 1993 and $410 million About.com in 2005, both of which it later sold for less.
Media outlets have been consolidating recently to help them compete for online ad revenue with tech giants like Google and Facebook. German media conglomerate Axel Springer bought Politico; Vox Media is buying Group Nine and animals site The Dodo; BuzzFeed bought HuffPost. San Francisco-based The Athletic covers national and local sports — more than 200 teams, according to the Times. It was founded in 2016 and has 1.2 million subscribers. Its website says it has over 400 editorial employees, making it a major acquisition for The Times, which has more than 2,000 editorial employees.
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