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NYTimes.com (NYSE: NYT) has managed to sign up more customers in less time than its UK namesake, and growth is steep.

How come?

NYTimes.com’s paid content strategy is a softer, more porous on-ramp than The Times’, operating a free story allowance before subscription is required. This may be reflected in the graph above.

But likely what the comparison really shows is the differing scales of the news publishers’ different addressable markets. The U.S. is larger than the UK, New York larger than London, and 12 percent of NYTimes.com’s subscriptions are coming from outside the States, while NYTCo also operates the adjacent International Herald Tribune. The Times remains a firmly British publication.

So a straight-up comparison isn’t necessarily possible. But interesting nonetheless. The more subscribers these publishers have, the greater their ability might be to staff their newsrooms.