The Times is close to “cresting the hill” in terms of digital revenue overtaking print, according to executive vice president and publisher Christopher Longcroft.
He said this means they are entering an era when investment in digital becomes more worthwhile as the gains become bigger and so growth accelerates.
Speaking to Press Gazette at a recent breakfast networking event, Longcroft painted an optimistic picture of growth for The Times titles which now have some 676,000 paying digital subscribers (up 7.5% year on year).
The Times and Sunday Times, which lost hundreds of millions during the heyday of print newspaper profitability from the 1980s to early 2000s, reported adjusted operating profit of £76m in 2025 on revenue up 2% to £391m .
Broadly speaking the Times appears to have achieved ‘escape velocity’ from its print legacy where growing digital revenue is outweighing newspaper decline.
Most UK newspaper titles no longer publish circulation figures, but industry trends would suggest The Times now sells around 120,000 copies per day and The Sunday Times around 220,000 (compared with 700,000 per day and 1.4 million per week in 2000).
Times web traffic growing despite Google changes
So far, The Times has not been hit by the existential threat du jour for most online news publishers: plunging referral traffic from Google.
This is partly due to investment in technical SEO (such as URL structure) following the move to a .com, rather than .co.uk, domain in 2024.
Lost search traffic has also been balanced, Longcroft said, by an increase in “low-calorie” traffic from Google Discover. He said: “The propensity of a Discover reader to subscribe, we know, is just a lot less than it would be if they came through traditional search.”
The Times has invested more resources in the US, hoping to cash in on a market that is not just nearly five times bigger than the UK – but where around 20% of the population has a paid online news subscription (versus around 10% in the UK), according to last year’s Reuters Digital News Report .
According to Ipsos iris data collated by Press Gazette , the Times titles had a monthly reach of just over ten million people in the UK in April 2026 (down 7.4% year on year), but total monthly audience minutes grew 7% year on year to 532 million.
Longcroft cited internal figures which show The Times titles hit a record 24 million global unique visitors in February, up 50% year on year.
But he said overall audience size is not the main metric they are looking at.
“Our focus is on the correlation between growing audiences and growing subscribers. Growing audience gives you a little bit of ad revenue, but that’s not a particularly efficient business, because the cost of doing that is probably not going to be offset by the revenues you’re getting in.
“We spend a lot of time looking at what we are doing to grow the audiences that convert. Because what we’re trying to do is get them to come in, read an article, read another article, understand what it is, see the breadth and depth of The Times, and then take out a subscription offer.
“Everything we do is about engagement. Because if we can get that subscriber to engage in our products, we know that if they read a newsletter, play a puzzle, interact with data, read X number of articles a week, we know that their propensity to churn comes down.”
Growing an engaged paying audience is main focus
Longcroft said the introduction of “bonus accounts” has been a big success in terms of growing the paying audience.
“We saw that people were sharing their passwords. And the problem about sharing passwords is that it really starts to dilute the quality of your data.
“So we said, why don’t we create bonus accounts? Why don’t we make it something that you actually get as a subscriber, and you actively encourage your family members to use them.
“Why don’t we get people to start to interact a little bit more together, so that they get a shared experience? And of course, what that does is, if you’re the principal account holder, it’s going to be a little bit awkward if you cancel, and all these people who are really enjoying the product lose access to it.
“It was also a really important one to change people’s perceptions of what a news experience is. And we’ve got, from just launching in October last year, around 120,000 new subscribers, essentially, who, pretty much all of them are new to us.”
“That’s great also for the advertisers, because they can now see a much wider cohort. And what we’re seeing is those audiences are exactly the audiences that we really want to increase. They’re younger, they’re more female, and they’re just as affluent.”
In the AI-era Times journalism remains proudly ‘human-made’
Longcroft believes that providing subscribers with authentically human content is an essential part of the formula.
“Everything we do at The Times is human-made. That has to be the standard. I mean, if you think about products worth paying for, if it’s not human-made, I think that starts to change that relationship.
“It doesn’t stop us from asking and encouraging our journalists to use AI tools in the process by which they research a story. But when it comes to the output, that needs to be human-made.”
Longcroft added: “We’re encouraging all our staff to use AI tools. And I think we’re pretty progressive as an organisation in that regard, we’ve got some great partnership deals with a lot of these platforms, and they’re allowing us to really customise their tools for our own uses.”
The Times chatbot is currently trained on a digital archive dating back to 2006 (some 2.2 million articles) but there are plans for it to extend back to the paper’s beginnings in 1785.
The chat functionality is currently found via a “Your questions” tab within the on-site search section.
Technology has also enabled The Times to increase the speed of development, particularly in relation to its app . Most recently this has seen Times Radio join the print edition and puzzles on the navigation bar at the bottom of every page.
“In the old world, our Live app used to update once every three months, often it was a tech release. The actual amount of product enhancement that we made was not hugely different in each three-month release.
“Since we released the new Live app, which is about a year ago, we release a new version of that every two weeks. And what that does is create that cadence of change.”
As digital revenue overtakes print, ‘mathematics gets easier’
The explosion of generative AI (and associated wholesale theft and repurposing of journalism) has led to more angst than usual about the future of an industry which feels uncertain at the best of times. But Longcroft paints a more optimistic picture than many.
“There are a lot of dark clouds on the horizon, and I’m tempting fate by saying it’s all going well. But generally, I think, if you can just maintain focus and momentum, you’ve got the chance of being able to deal with all the various speed bumps that you’re going to encounter.
“The glimmer of hope for me is that most of the national papers now, and a fair number of the regionals, are realising that you’ve got to get back to that dual income stream and advertising, although very important, can be a bit of a fickle friend. So moving towards subscriptions, I think, is really important.
“We’re moving to the point where we’re now going to be more digital than we are print. And I kind of liken that to when you’ve crested the top of the hill. I’m not saying it’s all going to be easy coming down, but the mathematics get easier. The amount that you’re having to replace will diminish in absolute terms, which means that your digital growth starts to become more accretive.
“And when that happens, you start to be able to think about investments in a very different way.
“I think, when you’ve got a business that is challenged and you’re dealing with those print headwinds, and you’re dealing with advertising headwinds as more money goes to the platforms, it makes it very difficult to invest.
“So having dual incomes, being very focused on getting products worth paying for, making sure you look at the ARPU [average revenue per user] just as much as you look at the subs number, I think that will give us all the possibility to get to a world where people go back to what they always did. They always paid for news.
“You go back to the 1960s, there were no free papers. If you wanted news, you paid. But when everybody pays, everybody pays a little. When only a few pay, they have to pay more. And in a way, I’m hoping we’ll get to a point where we’ll get back to that equilibrium where everyone can pay a little bit less, across a much wider audience.
“Because I do genuinely believe that what we do is very important, not just for for our shareholders, but actually, I think it’s very important for UK PLC that we have the ability to invest in original, quality journalism, so that we can play our part in maintaining this wonderful democracy.”
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