New York Times to invest $50m in global digital expansion

In October, the Times outlined plans to double its digital revenue by increasing the number of paid online subscribers and attracting more young and international readers. Photo / Getty Images

The New York Times will invest $50 million over the next three years to increase its digital audience around the world.

The Times has created a new team, called NYT Global, to "cultivate a much larger and deeper readership in core markets abroad and set up teams to pursue cross-market, pan-regional topics we believe The Times can dominate journalistically, appealing to readers and advertisers alike," Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Chief Executive Officer Mark Thompson and Executive Editor Dean Baquet said in a statement Thursday.

The Times is seeing "significant growth" in revenue from international markets, they said.

"But because our digital report is still designed and produced mainly for a U.S. audience, we have not come close to realizing our potential to attract readers outside our home market," they said. The $50 million investment "will be a down payment on a new era of international growth for our company."

NYT Global will be led by Joe Kahn, an assistant masthead editor for international, and Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, the Times' president of international operations.

In October, the Times outlined plans to double its digital revenue in the next four years by increasing the number of paid online subscribers and attracting more young and international readers. The Times generated $400 million in revenue through online advertising and subscriptions in 2014 and aims to bring in $800 million by 2020.

The Times reached a milestone last summer, as the number of paid digital subscribers surpassed 1 million. The paper is focused on increasing its pool of paying online readers as more people get their news on the Internet.

In February, the Times introduced a Spanish-language edition of its digital report to reach more readers outside the United States.