Earnings: NYT’s Web Ad Rev Up 23 Percent; Online Accounts For 7.5% Overall; TimesSelect Subs Nearing

Updated to include conference call: A newsy earnings release from the New York Times Company today, including word that the company’s internet businesses now account for 7.5 percent of overall reven ues, up 4.5 percent over 1Q05. The dollar amount: $62 million. The growth in revenue relevance is attributed to strong organic growth and the About.com acquisition last March. The 1Q06 earnings were skewed by a pre-tax gain that pumped up 1Q05; NYTCO turned in an operating profit of $68.3 million, down from $208.1 million. Some other highlights:
— Online ad revenues continue to increase in signficant double digits, up 23 percent over the same quarter last year.
— About.com, acquired at the end of the first quarter a year ago, increased revenues by 98 percent over the previous year with strong growth in display, cost-per-click and e-commerce. About reached 55 million unique visitors globally in March, up 40 percent from last year. Plans call for 100 new guides, creating more content and ad inventory.
— About.com had an operating profit of $7.6 million on $18.8 million in revenues. Times CFO Len Forman said that 40-percent margin can be sustained “at a minimum.”
— NYtimes.com, Boston.com and About.com together account for more than 1 billion page views.
— Despite a stronger performance from the Discovery Times Channel, the company announced it had excercised its right to be bought out by Discovery. No appraisal yet for the Times’ 50 percent but the minimum is $80 million and the ceiling is $135 million. NYTCO has invested about $104 million through the quarter.” When the partnership began, online video wasn’t nearly as rich in terms of content or advertising potential as it is now. President and CEO Janet Robinson during the conference call (via SeekingAlpha): “There is a very strong demand for video streaming on our websites. We’re seeing more and more and more of that, advertisers are really coveting that, and in light of that, we are going to put a strong emphasize on that development.”
— Robinson said there is a “huge search project in play right now that (R&D head) Michael Zimbalist in fact is working very closely on with his colleagues in Boston to really accelerate our ownership of that market. … we are investigating ways in which we can monetize Boston.com even more than we have right now. There are many learnings that we know we will get from the redesign of NYTimes.com that will migrate to what we see at Boston.com.”
From the March report:
— Online advertising was up nearly 24 percent for the month.
TimesSelect has approximately 465,000 subscribers — 62 percent home subscribers and about 38 percent online-only. Robinson : “To put an exact number in regard to how large we think this is going to be, I think would not necessarily be in keeping with what our plan would be, but from a perspective of how we are looking at the initial effort, really, only six, seven months into it we are extremely pleased with what we have seen.”
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