Mark Thompson
Analyst · FBR Capital Markets
Thanks Andrea and good morning everyone. The second quarter was a very busy one for the Company, and there’s plenty to talk about in the results. On the consumer side of the business, we launched the first of our new digital products, and they’ve helped us continue to grow our pool of digital-only subscribers. On the advertising side, we continued to make progress on digital advertising with a second consecutive quarter of growth and real excitement around Paid Posts, our native advertising product, and video. By contrast, and in common we believe with the rest of the industry, we saw some loss of momentum in print advertising in the second quarter after a very good start to the year. We continued to keep a good grip of core costs, even though investments in our latest round of products and services meant that profits for the quarter were down year-over-year. We believe, however, that investment spending is essential to secure long-term sustainable growth for the Company. Let me begin with the digital subscription story. In terms of numbers, at the end of the second quarter, our digital subscriber count was 831,000, an increase of approximately 32,000 during the quarter. That is some 9,000, or 39%, more net new subscribers than we added in the same quarter last year, with the new products – including NYT Now, NYT Opinion and Times Premier – representing the majority of the growth in the quarter. We’ve been pleased by the reaction of both consumers and the industry to the new products. NYT Now – our new iPhone app curated by New York Times editors that targets on-the-go consumers at a lower price point than our original digital subscription packages – has been particularly well-received. NYT Now, which has received real promotional support from Apple– including being named one of the best new apps early in the quarter – is reaching a younger demographic than our core digital packages. Demand and early statistics for retention of Times Premier, our highest-tier subscription package, have also been encouraging. The rollout of this new suite of paid products is quite different from the launch three years ago of our original pay gate on the website, where we had a huge base of heavily engaged users from day one. Our new products, in particular the NYT Now and Opinion apps, must market to and reach brand new audiences, stand out on their own and compete in a crowded marketplace. This effort will take some time, and we’ll need to build and flex some new marketing muscles. We’ve already learned plenty from our experience so far with the new product launches. While the NYT Now app is a clear and attractive consumer offering, we’ve been much less successful in presenting a clear offer to non-subscribers for lower-priced access to The Times on the web and our existing mobile platforms. So, while we continue to have confidence in Now as a new mobile expression of Times journalism for a new audience, we need to do more work to refine and effectively market a lower-priced offering across our core platforms. We’ll also assess and adjust the other products as necessary as our knowledge of real-world usage grows – and we’ll of course build those learnings into any subsequent new products, including our Cooking app. Denise and her team will be launching that in the fall, and it will initially be available for free to build up as large and engaged an audience as possible before we begin to charge. Within the total 32,000 net new digital subscribers added during the second quarter, the number of new subscribers to the core digital bundles was lower than we’ve seen and lower than we should be satisfied with. There were some one-off factors, including a large number of individually sold education subscriptions in the first quarter that, because of the college year, did not continue at the same rate in Q2. Cannibalization by the new products was also a factor, though direct cannibalization has been less than we had projected. A more significant problem, we believe, is that we underestimated the challenge of presenting the new, wider range of choices to our users and left some consumers confused as a result – obviously we are working hard to pivot and correct that. In addition, and despite the fact that the overall digital reach of The Times remains substantial, the ongoing secular shift in consumer usage from web to mobile and from home page to article-based consumption, while not a new phenomenon, was also a factor in the lower number of core net additions, because it represents a shift to less effective channels to market to and convert potential subscribers. We’re addressing this last issue in two ways. First by committing to the implementation of our recent Innovation Report, a study our newsroom leaders commissioned to address the rapidly changing digital landscape that highlighted these trends and set out some compelling recommendations on how to build and deepen the engagement of our digital audience. We’ve already completed some pilots using new audience development tools and practices – for instance in our digital coverage of the World Cup – where we’ve seen immediate and very encouraging results. We believe that we can maintain the excellence of our journalism but bring that journalism to a much wider audience by adopting state-of-art audience-building techniques both within and beyond our newsroom. This will yield benefits on both the digital subscription and advertising sides of the business. Our second response is an aggressive focus on improving subscription and advertising monetization on mobile devices, especially smartphones. The progress we’ve made on the presentation of our content in both the Now and Opinion apps must be matched across all of the mobile offerings with improved pathways to subscription, and more advertising units supported by better ad tech. Let me turn then to advertising as a whole. As I said at the start, we saw another good quarter of digital advertising growth with particularly encouraging growth in June. We’re early in the process of rolling out Paid Posts, our native advertising offering, but are very pleased with client demand and the numbers we’re seeing for actual reader engagement. Video too is on a good track. This month we received a total of seven Emmy nominations and it’s helping us to grow that advertising revenue stream as well. Video advertising is on course to nearly double in 2014, although of course it still represents a relatively modest portion of our total digital advertising revenue. Print advertising had a somewhat tougher time, declining nearly 7% year-on-year in the quarter. As we’ve noted previously, print will continue to face quite challenging year-on-year comparisons in Q3 and Q4, though against that, I am really encouraged by the progress Meredith and her team are making in developing and innovating within the print as well as digital advertising businesses. We’ve invested in the sales operation and new print and digital products and expect to see the benefit over the balance of the year, tempered of course by those tougher comparisons. In conclusion, we believe that our strategy of increasing our digital revenues by broadening and deepening the engagement of our audience and developing new digital consumer and advertising offerings is the right path to growth for the company. In recent months, we’ve shown we have what it takes – outstanding content, great design and tech – to deliver innovations both in consumer products and in digital advertising that really capture the imagination of customers. But we know we have more to do in fundamental audience development, in fine-tuning and marketing our portfolio and in seizing the opportunities of mobile. And, because we recognize that sustainable long-term growth for our digital business will take some time to secure, we will also continue to pay very close attention to our expenses and to the returns on our new investments. I will look forward to updating you along the way, but for now I’ll turn it over to Jim Follo for a more detailed financial review