We’ve mentioned before that the NYT doesn’t break out the academic half-price subs when it reports TimesSelect’s numbers. This came up again yesterday with the July report—but now we have an answer sent by a company spokeswoman late today and I have to say I’m surprised by how low it is. Of the roughly 198,000 paying subs, about 3,800—less than 2 percent—are students or faculty taking advantage of the academic discount. The official TimesSelect annual rate is $49.95; academic is $24.95. The academic discount began in January. Possibly more people will take advantage of the price, which includes 100 archive articles a month, with the new academic year starting.
No, you can’t subtract the number of academics from the rest and come up with the right revenue number. As we’ve reported before, about 20,000 of the paying subs signed up for the pre-launch rate of $39.95. Then there are the monthly subs and the 15,000 or so subs who were carried over from News Tracker. My best educated guess at this point is TimesSelect has about 139,400 full-paying subs representing about $6.9 million in revenues annually.
Related: TimesSelect: Doing the Math