In numbers: The reason the New York Times made a move for the Athletic
Following The New York Times’ (NYT) purchase of sports publication the Athletic earlier this month, new data has revealed that theathletic.com is growing its visits and unique visitors at a faster rate than any of its rivals, up nearly 70 per cent for both metrics.
In an effort to realise its goal of reaching 10 million subscribers by 2025, the NYT bought theathletic.com for an estimated $550m (£401m), with the deal set to close in the coming months.
Seema Shah, Senior Director of Research and Analytics at Similarweb, has come out to praise the move, highlighting the key opportunities for both publications.
Athletic’s popularity
theathletic.com had monthly average visits and unique visitors of nearly 15 million and six million, respectively, as of December 2021 from the prior year.
Total subscribers to the site have grown to 1.2 million, driving an estimated 2021 revenue of nearly $80m (£58m); this is expected to grow 55 per cent in 2022 to $120m (£87m) per media reports.
This suggests that theathletic.com can provide the NYT with a potentially longer-term sticky customer, who may also have or may eventually purchase a nytimes.com subscription. The NYT has stated that the deal is accretive to its topline.
According Similarweb data, relative to its peer group, theathletic.com was the fastest growing site in 2021 on a year-on-year basis globally, rising nearly 70 per cent, followed by sports.yahoo.com and si.com which grew 41 per cent and 34 per cent, respectively. Trends were similar for the unique visitor metric with theathletic.com leading at 73 per cent.
Advertising opportunities
With a sticky customer, comes sticky advertisers, and Shah highlighted: “theathletic.com has significantly more users in the 25-34 age group – a highly coveted demographic for advertisers. With this differentiated user base, advertising on the newyorktimes.com may appeal to a wider variety of companies and product lines.”
Similarweb data also revealed that global traffic from January 2021 to December 2021 showed that over 80 per cent of theathletic.com users are female, versus 48 per cent for the newyorktimes.com.
This provides a great opportunity for the iconic media company to snap up different pools of customers.
On top of this, Shah also added that the acquisition gives the NYT a foothold to expand into the betting space.
“On theathletic.com can place bets on games through its partnership with BetMGM.com, something that is currently not offered on the NYT’s sports page. This could further engagement and could lure fans away from other sports betting sites that have less coverage about various sports teams and leagues.”