By Adedapo Adesanya
The New York Times has agreed to buy a subscription-based sports website, The Athletic, for $550 million in cash, as the 170-year-old newspaper adds more digital content to grab subscribers.
Founded in 2016, the Athletic had 1.2 million subscribers as of December and covers more than 200 clubs and teams around the world.
“Acquiring the Athletic puts us in a position to be a global leader in sports journalism,” said NY Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien.
The deal shows NY Times’s push towards a subscription-first model, which has become a growing trend across the media industry, as the newspaper struggles with steep declines in advertising and print readership.
In the last three years, the company said it has added more than 8 million paid subscriptions across digital and print products.
Levien said the NY Times hoped that The Athletic deal would help it to its goal of more than 10 million subscriptions.
The deal is expected to immediately add to the newspaper’s revenue growth.
The Athletic will operate as a separate unit of the company and its founders, Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, will stay on with the NY Times after the acquisition.
The Athletic launched its UK operation in 2019, with subscribers paying £4.99 a month for access to sports news stories, long reads and feature articles.
Since expanding to the UK, the outlet has moved to poach a number of established football writers, with a correspondent assigned to each Premier League football club.
The NY Times in recent years has used targeted acquisitions to diversify its audience by publishing everything from recipes to podcasts.
In 2016, it bought product-testing and recommendation platform Wirecutter, and in June 2020 acquired Serial Productions, the studio behind the hit podcast of the same name.
According to Crunchbase, The Athletic has raised a total of $139.5 million from investors since its inception and was valued at between $500 million and $1 billion when it last raised funds in January 2020.
Dipo Olowookere