The Boston Globe’s paid digital circulation jumps to 313,000 thanks to institutional deals

I started teaching full-time in 2005. Back then, large piles of The Boston Globe were distributed across Northeastern’s campus. Because students were able to pick up a free Globe on the way to class, I could ask them to bring the paper and be familiar with the main stories of the day.

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Those stacks disappeared years ago. Northeastern worked out a deal for discounted digital subscriptions for students, and I and most of my colleagues in our journalism school required them. But free distribution didn’t return until earlier this year, when Northeastern renegotiated its arrangement with the Globe. Now Northeastern picks up the cost of a digital subscription, and it is free to students, faculty and staff. I actually canceled the paid subscription we’d had since the mid-’80s (digital-only in recent years) and made the switch.

This is all preliminary to telling you about an interesting story about the latest in the Globe’s reader-revenue strategies. Reported by Charlotte Tobitt, it appears in Press Gazette, a respected U.K.-based publication about the “future of media.”

It turns out that institutional subscriptions have become a significant part of the Globe’s paid digital circulation. Regular paid digital circulation stands at 263,000, which is more or less where it has been for the past two years — although it has ticked up a bit since December, when it was 260,500.

The eye-opener is that the Globe had sold 50,000 institutional subscriptions through April, bringing total paid digital circulation to 313,000. Northeastern and MIT are among the latest of 40 institutions that are taking part in the program.

Now, you might ask whether those institutional subscriptions are as valuable as those purchased by an individual who’s decided that the Globe’s journalism is worth paying for. My answer would be no, and yes. No because of course you’re not going to value an employer-paid benefit as much as something you pay for yourself. Yes because newspapers engage in all kinds of promotions to attract readers.

For instance, the Globe is hardly unusual in charging new subscribers $1 for six months. The goal is to retain those readers once the discount period ends. (Tobitt reports that the non-discounted rate is $27.72 a month, but Globe subscribers know that some readers are charged more just because.) Tom Brown, the Globe’s chief consumer revenue officer, told Tobitt that the Globe enjoys “stable engagement and retention rates,” although no numbers were cited. Likewise, students who value their free subscriptions are likely to become paid subscribers if they stay in the Boston area after graduation.

By the way, the Globe is hardly alone. Northeastern has also worked out free digital subscription deals with The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Economist and others. Of course, it would be useful to know how much revenue the Globe and these other publications receive per customer, but, assuming it’s lucrative enough, it’s a stable source of digital revenue in an otherwise unstable environment.

There are some other interesting tidbits in Tobitt’s article as well. You should read the whole thing, but these stand out:

• Even though The New York Times owns the newspaper games-and-puzzles category, the Globe has done well, with about 20,000 subscribers playing regularly.
• Website traffic is down, a development that Globe Media CEO Linda Henry attributes to AI search, which produces little in the way of referral traffic. “The biggest shift we’re seeing is that AI is making information abundant and inexpensive,” she said. “It’s getting very good at summarizing what happened. What it can’t do is replicate life experiences and trust, and that’s where our resilience lies.”
• Henry expects the Globe will still be printing a newspaper five years from now, with Brown adding that the high price ($70 a week) the Globe charges offsets the shrinking number of print readers: “We have tens of thousands of subscribers who have a deep affinity for physical newspapers and we’re committed to continuing to serve them as long as it makes sense.”