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US publisher New York Times Digital continues to bring in a healthy income from its NYTimes.com website, achieving its highest operating profit yet for the past financial quarter.

Profits from the site have risen for two consecutive years, mainly due to increased advertising revenue and its NewsTracker email news service, which now has 18,000 subscribers.

Revenue was up from $17.8 million in 2002 to $21.6 million in 2003 - an increase of 21.7 per cent. Operating profit for the same period rose from $1.9 million to $4.3 million.

The announcement is good news for the web publishing industry, confirming recent research findings of increased spending on internet advertising. The news also underlines the success of the NYTimes.com publishing model, combining free and paid-for services to create a profitable news site.

Len Forman, senior vice-president and chief financial officer for The New York Times Company, said the revenues and operating profits had reached record levels for NYTimes Digital.

"Advertising revenues climbed 30 per cent and the division continued to expand its premium product offerings with the re-launch of NYTimes.com's NewsTracker email alert service as a paid service," he said.

"We are optimistic about the continued growth of our paid products."

Speaking to the Jupiter Media Forum in 2002 on the dynamics of paid content, NYTimes chief executive officer Martin Nisenholtz explained how the site's strategy can only succeed if sufficient scale is achieved.

"We are a major online publishing brand with a big global aspiration. About a third of our revenues come from display advertising, another third from syndication and pay products and the remaining third from a mix of classified marketplaces and direct email.

"This diversity has fuelled our march to profitability and served us extremely well through the advertising downturn."

See also:
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story501.html
http://www.journalism.co.uk/profile2.html
http://www.paidcontent.org

• Brits online: In the UK, the internet was the only advertising sector to see increased spending over the past financial quarter. Research by NTC Research and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising shows that web adverts made significant gains over traditional advertising and direct marketing. The number of companies with no online advertising spend also fell to the lowest level for more than a year.

Source:
http://www.brandrepublic.com/digitalbulletin/news_story.cfm?articleID=185400&Origin=DB15072003

• Caching in - Google sneaks under the subscription radar: Search engine Google has been sending web users to New York Times web pages that should only be viewed by subscribers. A spokesperson for NYTimes.com told dotJournalism that "evidently, there was a time when older article pages from NYTimes.com were available for free through the "cached" link on a Google search result.

"The caching issue has been resolved and now those search results pages go to a paid archive pages on NYTimes.com."

Source:
http://www.paidcontent.org/pc/arch/2003_07_09.shtml

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