New York Times' Digital Subscriptions Rise In 2013, Ad Revenues Still Down

The New York Times Co. still can't seem to catch a break as they shift to develop both digital and print platforms.

The Times saw a 19 percent increase in digital subscriptions in 2013, the company announced Thursday. They had 760,000 digital subscriptions to its products at the end of 2013, up from 640,000 at the end of 2012, Poynter reported.

However, print advertising revenue was still down, dropping 7 percent for the year of 2013. Despite the rise of digital subscriptions, digital advertising was also down about 4 percent, resulting in a 6 percent overall decrease in advertising revenue.

The growth of digital subscriptions is promising after The Times struggled to keep revenue up in 2013. In October, Bloomberg reported that The Times was having trouble replacing print ads with digital sales. Both print and digital ads decreased around 3 percent in Q3 of 2013.

Even so, 2013 was a hopeful year for newspapers looking to embrace digital media. Increases in online subscriptions helped the newspaper industry begin to grow for the first time since 2003.

(h/t: Poynter)