From time to time, Marketecture invites guest authors to weigh in with their unique insights on the media, marketing, and ad tech spaces. Today’s guest author, Alex Brownstein of 3C Ventures, gives his take on a media industry that’s being perpetually squeezed for margin and reinvention. Brownstein studies different strategies within the media, marketing, and advertising landscape. In this series, he explores how different media companies—iconic institutions and upstart insurgents alike—adapt, endure, or reinvent their models in pursuit of sustainable advantage. Today, he looks at the somehow-still-relevant New York Times.

Also, are you attending Marketecture Live today? Look for him there!

The New York Times launched in 1851 as an antidote to the sensationalist press. It promised sobriety, credibility, and breadth. A century and a half later, the promise holds, but the product, platform, and strategy have changed entirely.

The Times isn’t a legacy newsroom that survived the digital transition. It’s perhaps one of the clearest cases of a print-era media brand rearchitecting itself to actually make money on the internet as a durable digital business. (Indeed, that does happen!)

Through subscription-first economics, vertical product innovation, and brand-led expansion, The Times has done what few others have managed: built a scalable, multi-product digital platform with journalism at the core. Yes, it’s a story about a newspaper that managed not to die out in the internet age. But it’s also a case study in long-term business model reinvention.

While so many traditional publishers flail in a digital economy that tends to disregard legacies, The Times has proven you can teach an old institution new tricks if you're willing to treat product strategy, customer acquisition, and platform design with the same rigor you apply to investigative reporting.

The New York Times’ first inflection point came in 1896, when Adolph Ochs acquired the struggling paper and laid the groundwork for what would become the publication’s enduring brand strategy: institutional voice, editorial independence, and public service. The motto he introduced (“All the News That’s Fit to Print”) was a tagline as well as product positioning. And it held.

Through the 20th century, The Times scaled its influence through both editorial innovation and institutional design. It created new formats (the crossword in 1942, the Op-Ed page in 1970), acquired adjacent platforms (WQXR radio in 1944), and expanded its geographic footprint through moves like the acquisition of the International Herald Tribune in 1967.

Each of these steps reflected a central belief: Authority was earned through reporting as well as architecture. That included physical infrastructure (news bureaus, printing presses), journalistic process (layers of fact-checking), and product design (the now-iconic front page layout). The Times outgrew its footprint as a newspaper to become a distribution system for influence.

While many of its peers doubled down on scale during the early 2000s internet boom, The Times bet on depth. It was slow to adopt the open web’s logic of virality and fast news, but it was faster than most to understand the importance of user revenue.

The real strategic breakthrough came in 2011, when The Times launched its metered paywall. It was a controversial move at the time, with critics worried it would kill traffic, but it worked. Turns out people will pay for things that aren’t garbage. Wild idea, right?

By 2015, digital subscriptions were growing faster than print was declining. By 2023, the company reported over 9.7 million digital-only subscribers and $2.3 billion in annual revenue, with 67% of it coming from subscriptions. This all came to pass at a time when most publishers were (and still are) running on hope and programmatic advertising scraps.

Critically, The Times resisted the temptation to unbundle everything. Instead of spinning off vertical brands, it built a single, unified app that brought together News, Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, and Audio under one login. In doing so, it transformed the bundle from a news paywall into a consumer product suite.

The most successful of those products? NYT Games and NYT Cooking.

NYT Games started with the crossword (long a fixture in American puzzle culture), but it evolved into a daily ritual product. Under Will Shortz’s editorship, the crossword became both harder and smarter, creating a clear learning curve and sense of achievement for daily solvers. The expansion into Spelling Bee, Tiles, Vertex, and the 2022 acquisition of Wordle supercharged growth.

Wordle alone brought in tens of millions of users in its first year. By 2023, NYT Games had over 1 million paying subscribers.

NYT Cooking followed a different playbook. It began in 2014 as a free recipe archive and became a standalone subscription product by 2017. With over 20,000 tested recipes and a contributor slate that included Sam Sifton, Melissa Clark, and Alison Roman, Cooking became both a utility and a lifestyle brand. It passed 1 million paying subscribers in 2023, driven by a surge in pandemic-era home cooking (sooooo many banana bread recipes) and a sharp focus on UX, searchability, and community interaction.

The takeaway: The Times extended its brand through these verticals. It passed over lifestyle fads and focused on cultivating habitual behaviors wrapped in Times-level editorial design.

People trust The Times to tell them the news. Turns out, they also trust it to tell them how to make lasagna and solve a crossword too. Brand halo works.

Look, not every publisher or brand has the jumping-off point that The New York Times had when it came time to reinvent itself for the new digital reality. But there are some strategies at play that can be useful to other companies that are trying to stay relevant (i.e., profitable):

Brand integrity as business moat: The Times never surrendered its editorial center of gravity. Even as it expanded into games and cooking, it retained the credibility halo of a journalistic brand. That trust proved transferable.

Subscription as platform, not paywall: The move to a single-app ecosystem allowed The Times to upsell, cross-promote, and retain subscribers across verticals. More importantly, it transformed The Times from a newspaper into a digital consumer brand with high-margin products.

Verticals that reinforced, not distracted: Rather than chase every interest group, The Times focused on rituals. Daily puzzles, weekly meal planning, longform Sunday reads. These were use cases that could build long-term habits, not just traffic spikes.

Operational investment in product: Where many legacy media companies treated product as “the thing IT does,” The Times built serious product leadership into the organization. It recruited executives from Spotify, Amazon, and Google. It put design and engineering at the center of the newsroom. The app was no afterthought.

The New York Times has reached a scale few could have imagined when it launched as a local daily in the 19th century. But its current strategy of bundling products, reinforcing habit loops, and scaling subscriptions is more akin to Spotify or Duolingo than to any newspaper of the past.

It still does the hard things well: accountability in journalism, foreign bureaus, deep investigations. But it has also learned to do the sticky things: puzzles, recipes, curated recommendations, product reviews. It has become a platform where serious journalism subsidizes joyful distraction, and vice versa.

That’s (at least one vision of) the future of media. And The Times got there by doing something deceptively simple: getting editorial and product on the same page.

Alex Brownstein is a strategist and operator focused on the intersection of corporate strategy and the evolving media-tech landscape. With a background at McKinsey and Credit Suisse, he now is a Partner at 3C Ventures, leading strategic projects. He advises companies that monetize through ads, subscriptions, or both, and the value chain that supports. His work explores how executive decisions—on org design, partnerships, product, go-to-market, etc.—shape competitive advantage across the advertising and marketing value chain. He writes about what martech, adtech, and AI decisions really signal: not just tech bets, but corporate strategy in motion.