How the New York Times applied marketing technology to triple subscriptions

The New York Times print advertising business experienced a sudden shock in 2008 when the paper lost most of its ad revenue nearly overnight. “All of a sudden the subscription revenue was higher than advertising,” said Kristian Kristensen, The Times VP of engineering. Now there is a 70-30 split between the New York Times’ subscription revenue and its advertising revenue, with 70 percent of the paper’s revenue coming from subscriptions. Before print advertising revenue shrunk, this split used to be flipped. In 2017, the New York Times published its 2020 Report outlining the newsroom’s strategy and aspirations and making it clear the New York Times was a subscription-first business. Since 2014, the paper has tripled its subscriber number from one million to 3.5 million, with a goal of growing its subscription base to 10 million by 2025. The need for a martech product manager. To meet the ambitious subscription goals, Pamela Della Motta, director of product marketing technology at The New York Times, said there was a need to integrate the company’s disparate data. The paper’s technology solutions were too siloed and nothing was working. “If you looked closer, this was an engineering problem,” said Della Motta during a talk with Kristensen at MarTech Conference Thursday. She noted that the company’s engineering team was already booked with priorities, and there was a disconnect between the engineers and the marketers who didn’t speak the same business language. This is where the role of the martech product manager came in.