New York Times buying sports website for USD 550 million
The New York Times announced it is buying subscription based sports website The Athletic for USD 550 million in cash saying it will further strengthen the company’s digital subscription business. The NYT’s subscription business has been booming. The company says it has 8 million paid subscriptions and has 10 million as a target for 2025.
The Athletic is a global digital subscription-based sports media business covering more than 200 clubs and teams in the U.S. and around the world. Meredith Kopit Levien, president and chief executive officer of The New York Times Company, said:
“Acquiring The Athletic puts us in a position to be a global leader in sports journalism and offer English speakers around the world another reason to turn to the Times Company to meet their daily news and life needs.”
“Strategically, we believe this acquisition will accelerate our ability to scale and deepen subscriber relationships. 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.”
Alongside our core news report, New York Times Cooking, New York Times Games, Wirecutter and Audm, we’ll have a more robust offering to engage the millions of subscribers we already have and convert many more new ones among our 100 million-plus registered users.
The Athletic was founded in January 2016 by Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann. As of December 2021, the site had 1.2 million subscribers. The Athletic will be a subsidiary of the Times Company and continue to operate separately. Mr. Mather and Mr. Hansmann will report to Times Company executive David Perpich who will be the publisher of The Athletic.
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