The New York Times' ARPU strategy

Here are the two high-level tactics anchoring the Times' ARPU playbook, which centers around driving subscribers to its bundle (which includes News, Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, and The Athletic):

Pushing new subscribers to the bundle

Growth to the Times' bundle is currently driven more by new subscribers than existing subscribers who upgrade. In Q4 of last year, more than 30% of new subscribers chose the bundle, representing a 6-fold increase from the prior year. Wherever a user hits a paywall in the NYT universe, the company is able to promote the bundle, as noted by Kopit Levien: “Anywhere we would otherwise sell [the] News subscription, and in a number of other places like Games, we are intervening and saying, ‘do you want to buy the bundle instead?’... Many of the people who are buying the bundle are people who would have otherwise bought News in a previous era.”

Raising prices of single-product subscriptions

This year the NYT plans to notify at least 1.5 million single-product subscribers of price increases, and the company is also raising prices when customers hit the end of their promotional introductory periods. This increases ARPU directly for single-product subscribers, and it also increases ARPU indirectly by “driving even more people to the bundle as its relative price becomes more attractive,” according to Kopit Levien.

For more color, keep reading here:
https://www.businessside.co/p/the-nyts-arpu-strategy