Mark Thompson
Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead
Thanks, Harlan and good morning everyone. Well, this was another strong quarter. We grew revenue and operating profit year-over-year. Subscriptions continue to grow with the 105,000 net new subscriptions to our digital news product. The Times now has 3.5 million total paid subscriptions by far the most in our history. Through the quarter, we put much of our new digital operations organization in place under our new COO, Meredith Kopit Levien. I'm already seeing improved coordination and execution both of which will help us to continue to scale our digital business. One of the reasons so many new subscribers have decided to pay for Times journalism is it sheer breadth. The New York Times continues a course to offer comprehensive and offer regulatory and gender setting coverage of current U.S. politics. With the Times is like a multi-ocean navy unusual to be breaking major new stores about the Trump Administration and devoting expensive journalistic resources to other investigations as well as general domestic and international news. The Times was the first to reveal that Harvey Weinstein reached numerous settlements with women for sexual harassment, sparking a global discussion on predatory behavior by powerful men. Reported Jodie Kantor and Megan Toole [ph] spent months meticulously naming down the details and convincing sources to go on the record. This comes after Emily Phillip and Michael Schmidt's [ph] reporting on Bill O'Reilly and Fox News earlier this year, a continuing story that they added to a little more than a week ago and also Katie Benner's coverage of harassment in Silicon Valley. It was also a quarter where our news replaced an unusual number of large scale, hard news stories providing unrivaled coverage of the Las Vegas Mass Shooting, Earthquakes in Mexico and back-to-back Hurricanes without missing a beat covering the rest of the world from the economy to Washington to the arts and more. The Times continues to attract the best journalistic talent in the business, Corey Seager [ph] was named styled editor, Jessica Bennett [ph] was named gender editor and we'll drive our coverage at how gender shapes the lives of people across the globe. And we have a certified genius, Nicole Hanna Jones [ph] with Leyla MacArthur genius [ph] Editorial Department won an Emmy that 10th at The New York Times and unusual 4 [ph] Online Journalism Awards. And then there is the Daily, our nine-month-old audio news report, that has been downloaded more than 100 million times since February. It's consistently at the top of the Apple podcast chart and is the fifth most popular podcast according to Podtrac, an industry ranking. The Daily audio program that we uniquely position to deliver lies heavily on the breadths and depths of Times journalism and the extraordinary level of expertise of Times reporters and editors. It became a daily habit setting the tone for the news day for the more than three quarters of a million people who download and stream at each day. So, let's now look at the results for the quarter in detail. We added 154,000 total net new digital subscriptions, an increase of nearly 60% over this quarter last year. Of these as I said a 105,000 came from our news product, 26,000 from our crossword product and 23,000 from our cooking product. We transitioned cooking to a paid product in July and it's off to a very encouraging start both as a standalone product and as an addition to higher price subscription bundles. Revenue from the company's digital only subscription which includes news, crossword and cooking subscriptions increased 46% compared to the third quarter of 2016 to $86 million. Overall subscription revenue that includes digital subscriptions spent time delivery and print single copy sales rose 14% to $247 million. The subscribers who enrolled in the fourth quarter 2016 and first quarter 2017 continue to retain at least as well as and in some case better than previous cohorts on the same promotions. Of course, we'll continue to monitor engagement of frequency depths and types of content with which they engage as they reached to 12-month mark, but so far, we are very encouraged by the results we've seen. Turning to advertising, this quarter marked our fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth for digital advertising in this case up 11% year-over-year. You've often heard me say that we don't expect digital advertising growth to be a straight line and if we project digital advertising revenue for the fourth quarter to be flat or slightly down compared to the same quarter last year. That's due in part of some individual campaigns in 2016, not repeat in 2017 in the corporate and adequacy categories underlie that we will have less in country to sale for dramatically, but we had during the elections season last year. But we will remain fully confident in our ability to deliver sustainable revenue growth in digital advertising by completing our display offering with a broadest way to marketing services and more commercial partnership like those we currently have with Samsung and Google. We will continue to roll out the strategy in 2018. The print advertising market remains challenging and Q3 decline over 20% year-over-year with almost deeper to previous quarters. But our exposure to declining revenues stream is less than since ever been. Print advertising represented just 17% of total company revenue in the quarter, almost $22 million less than digital subscription revenue which is why we are able to grow by the top-line revenue and adjusted operating profit despite these headwinds. Total advertising revenues will $114 million down 9% from the previous year. Revenues for the company at a whole with $386 million up 6%, while our adjusted operating profit of $26 million represents the 44% increase compared with the same quarter last year. This increase will drive growth in digital revenue. We continue to follow road map outlined in our path forward and our Newsrooms 2020 report and we are on tracked to meet our goal of $800 million of annual digital revenue by 2020. Before I conclude, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge my colleague given follow at last we announce intention to retire in early 2018. James has been a trusted advisor to me and our publisher and I am very grateful for his many contribution of his nearly a lovely career New York Times. If we will fulfill the end of February next year to help achieve us snooze transition to success us. The search process is now underway, but it means for James to have one more New York Times Company earnings call to look forward to lucky charm. Now let me turn over to him for a more detailed financial review.