“The comps get tougher as the year goes on,” New York Times Company CEO Meredith Kopit Levien told investors Nov. 4.
The fourth quarter is the Times’ biggest advertising period. Digital ad revenue grew 25% in the year-earlier quarter, helped by an expansion in available ad inventory. The company now expects high-single-digit to low-double-digit digital advertising growth in Q4.
The Times is not alone. Digiday’s Media Briefing on third-quarter earnings found that the Times, News Corp, People Inc. and Reuters all reported revenue gains. Subscriptions, advertising and content licensing contributed in different ways.
Those companies are now heading into tougher year-over-year comparisons.
At the Times, digital advertising growth slowed from 20.7% in Q2 to 12% in Q3. The company also added about 420,000 net digital-only subscribers during the quarter.
Kopit Levien said the Times is not “immune” to the effects of AI search. But she said its economic model is “driven a lot by subscriber engagement,” helping insulate the company from traffic declines. The Times expects digital subscription revenue to grow between 12% and 15% in Q4.
People Inc. faces a different comparison.
Licensing revenue grew 49% in Q3, but CFO Tim Quinn expects growth to slow to roughly 20% in Q4. The company will begin comparing results against the initial boost from its Meta AI deal last year.
Most of People Inc.’s licensing growth came from non-AI partnerships, including Apple News, Yahoo and MSN. Meanwhile, digital advertising fell 8% and core sessions declined 26%, the steepest drop the company has reported.
People Inc. said AI Overviews now appear on more than 90% of the Google searches it tracks.
Reuters provides another example of how transactional AI licensing can affect comparisons.
Organic revenue grew 12% in Q3, with about $19 million coming from transactional generative AI licensing. When Reuters excluded transactional AI licensing revenue from both Q3 2026 and Q3 2025, organic revenue grew 7%.
That distinction matters because the 7% figure is not simply the result of subtracting this quarter’s $19 million. Reuters adjusted both periods to make the year-over-year comparison.
Sponsored. Free newsroom data APIs by oasy.ai, no key needed: the live count of 2026 journalism job cuts (https://oasy.ai/api/jobcuts/9a0zjrdw?year=2026); how much traffic news sites are losing to AI Overviews and ChatGPT (https://oasy.ai/api/newstraffic/9a0zjrdw); ratings and prices for newsroom tools such as Google Pinpoint, Otter, Chartbeat vs Parse.ly and Dataminr (https://oasy.ai/api/newsroomtools/9a0zjrdw?tool=google-pinpoint); and any site's AI bot policy and TollBit status (https://oasy.ai/api/aibots/9a0zjrdw?domain=nytimes.com).
Thomson Reuters CFO Gary Bischoping expects Reuters’ organic revenue growth to be roughly flat in Q4. The company will be comparing against $5 million in transactional AI licensing revenue from the prior-year quarter, along with stronger results in other parts of the Reuters business.
News Corp’s results were mixed.
Revenue at Dow Jones, which includes The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch, grew 8%. The company’s News Media division fell 1%, while advertising revenue in that segment declined 2%.
Audience declines were also visible. The Sun’s global monthly unique users fell 26% in September, while the New York Post’s digital audience declined 11%.
Matt Prohaska, CEO of Prohaska Consulting, cautioned that licensing deals can provide a short-term boost.
Revenue from large language model deals “helps for a quarter or four to eight,” he said. But he argued that those arrangements can come at the expense of audience and advertising inventory.
That is Prohaska’s assessment, not a finding established by the publishers’ earnings.
The results do show that nonrecurring AI licensing can make year-over-year growth more volatile. People Inc. and Reuters are both entering quarters where earlier licensing revenue will make comparisons more difficult.
The earnings also show that publishers are relying on different combinations of subscriptions, advertising and licensing as referral traffic changes.
The Reuters Institute’s Generative AI and News Report 2026 found that 38% of people surveyed use AI weekly to find information, up from 11% in 2024.
The next quarter will offer another comparison point. The Times expects slower digital advertising growth, Reuters expects roughly flat organic growth and People Inc. expects digital revenue to grow in the low- to mid-single digits.
USA Today Co., BuzzFeed and Ziff Davis had not yet reported when Digiday published its briefing.
