New York Times leans into video as search declines

The New York Times added 280,000 digital-only subscribers in the second quarter of 2026, down from the 310,000 it added in the first three months of the year. As search traffic declines, the company is increasingly turning to video to reach and retain audiences.

The slowdown came during a quarter packed with news, including the Iran war, the FIFA World Cup and four Pulitzer wins, Nieman Lab reported.

CEO Meredith Kopit Levien pointed to the changing economics of the web.

“We delivered our Q2 results against the backdrop of a rapidly changing information ecosystem shaped by a small number of big tech companies whose moves continue to result in less traffic to publishers,” she said in prepared remarks for the company’s earnings call. “The Times isn’t immune to that impact.”

Are you an AI Agent? Read more here >

That’s a notable admission from a publisher that has long been viewed as one of the best positioned to withstand the decline in search traffic.

Smaller news organizations have been warning about falling referrals from Google and other platforms for years. The Times has had a significant advantage: 13.3 million total subscribers and a direct relationship with readers that many publishers lack. The company says it remains roughly on track to reach 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027. Total subscription revenue rose to $538 million in the quarter.

But the Times is increasingly looking beyond search to reach audiences — and video is a big part of that strategy.

Kopit Levien described the company’s video investments as “long-term bets.” They helped push adjusted operating costs up 10% from a year earlier. The Times hired eight video journalists in January and currently lists 12 open positions focused on video.

The company added a Watch tab to its flagship app last year and launched a Shows tab this week for longer-form franchises spanning news, opinion, culture and lifestyle.

Much of that programming puts Times reporters in front of the camera to explain their own reporting. Kopit Levien called the format “inherently humanizing and trust building.” The company now produces thousands of videos each quarter.

Asked about the financial return from the video push, Kopit Levien said video has played a “minor role” in advertising revenue so far. The company’s priority, she said, is to “really focus on scaling production, scaling engagement, and then scaling monetization.”

The Times did not disclose engagement figures, making it difficult to assess how well the investment is working from the outside.

There’s another cost worth watching: the company’s legal fight over generative AI.

The Times spent $4.6 million on generative AI-related litigation during the quarter, bringing its total to $32.9 million since it began breaking out those costs in early 2024. For the country’s most successful digital news publisher, litigation over the use of journalism to train AI systems has become a recurring, eight-figure expense.

For other newsrooms, the Times’ results point to an uncomfortable reality that even scale may not be enough to offset the loss of search traffic.

The Media Copilot has tracked declining search referrals across the industry, and the Times’ experience suggests the problem is not limited to smaller publishers. Its response — building direct distribution through video on its own platforms — requires substantial investment and may take years to monetize.

That leaves smaller publishers looking for cheaper ways to accomplish the same thing.

The audience logic is straightforward. Pew Research Center data shows Americans increasingly getting news from video-first platforms, particularly younger audiences.

The bigger question is whether the Times can turn that audience into paying subscribers quickly enough to justify the cost of building a video operation — before the economics of digital publishing shift again.