Thank you. Kick off, yes. I feel as though every year at Cannes there's a big theme and this year at Cannes it definitely feels like the theme is bringing humanity to AI. When it comes to AI, the New York Times has played a critical leadership role. You all were one of the first news organizations to sue an AI company, suing OpenAI and Microsoft. And the question I have for you is that lawsuit was notable to me because you went at it unilaterally on your own. I've seen other news organizations partner to bring forth a lawsuit. Why go at it yourself as opposed to maybe partnering with some other organizations?
Yeah, great question. Happy to be here. And hope we talk about the lawsuit and also the ways we're using AI to make the journalism richer and also to make the work more accessible. But on the lawsuit, what I will say is the stakes are really, really high here. These companies that make the LLMs have taken our work. They've used it without our permission and compensation and they've used it to build products that can substitute for the New York Times and we think that that is a really big issue for the New York Times. It's a really big issue for journalism and for all creators, all rights holders and ultimately we think it's a really big issue for the public. And by the way, it will be a really big issue for the LLMs because if there isn't a sustainable business model for high quality independent journalism and other creative work, there won't be anything to move through the LLMs. Why did we take on the lawsuit? As I said, the stakes are high, one. Two, we believe the law is really clear here and it's on our side. We have a lot of conviction in what we've done two and a half years in. We also felt like the Times had particularly good claims. We've been at it for our 175th year of operations. So, we've been producing an enormous amount of high-quality independent journalism for a really long time. We have a huge number of works. And also, we produce an enormous amount of new material every single day. I think last year we produced something like half a million works. And we thought it was really important that the claims be strong. And we feel like our claims are really, really strong. So, that's why we're doing it. I want to say we feel strongly that in industry, journalism, and creative work where everyone is fighting hard to enforce their intellectual property rights in whatever way makes sense to them is really, really useful.
We've spoken to a lot of legal experts that say you have a strong case. But if the courts do decide that training on your data is fair use, what is the Times' plan B to protect its journalism?
Let me say our business is the creation of high-quality independent journalism and other kinds of intellectual property. And the outcomes here are incredibly important. And at the same time, I want to say the Times has existed for, you know, almost two centuries, a century and another 75 years in an ecosystem shaped by much bigger players who determine a lot of what consumers can see. And the Times has worked really, really hard over the last, let's call it, 10, 12, 15 years to build resilience to the sort of changing forces in that ecosystem. And what does that resilience look like? We build products. We have news coverage and lifestyle products that people seek out and they ask for by name and they make room for in their lives. They build habits with and that's going to be the case however the ecosystem evolves. We really believe that. So, when something big and important happens in the world, people come to the Times because they know they're going to get information they trust. When they want to have a diversion, they come and they play Wordle or they play Connections. When they want to know what's happening today in the World Cup and does America really have a chance to win? Maybe they're going to go to The Athletic. And across the board, we have built brands that are worthy of that and we've built coverage and engagement, the software that makes people find and engage with the work that make it so that people are going to come anyway. We have an enormous amount of direct relationships and people who have daily habit with us. So, building resilience even as the stakes are really high.
Especially with that product-first mindset is very key. You mentioned Wordle. I think there are so many people who come to the Times because of exposure to lifestyle products, but then they subscribe to the broader bundle, they get access to news. How do you from a product and resources roadmap ensure that you are consistently providing resources to core news and journalism when a lot of your growth is coming from lifestyle products?
Yeah. Well, that's a fun question. Let me say Wordle was played I think 4.2 billion times. I think it just turned 5 years old. So, so many people play Wordle and we want our games. We now have a dozen games. We want our games. We want our recipes. We want our shopping advice with Wirecutter. We want The Athletic, which has the world's largest sports newsroom by miles and miles, 550 journalists. We want each of those products to be the best you can possibly have in that domain and we are on a path to doing that. In some cases, we are already there and incredibly excited about it. So, we want them each to be huge and resonant in culture and really important to the consumer, but make no mistake. By far the most important thing we do at The New York Times and the most economically value creating is high-quality independent news journalism, which means professionally trained reporters and editors pursuing the truth wherever it may lead on the world's most important topics, even when it leads to uncomfortable places and doing that in a way that serves no one's interest but the public's. And you asked me about how do you deal with road maps and investment. I've been at The Times 13 years. The thing I am most proud of is we have a core newsroom, core news operation that is many hundreds of people, many, many hundreds of people bigger today than it was when I got there. I think we have something like 2,300 people just in the core New York Times newsroom today. And anywhere The Times has gotten, anyone who asked me about our success, anything we've achieved is first and most because we kept investing in high-quality independent journalism, the journalists, the support structure around that, and we're always going to do that.
And just a quick follow-up, you mentioned that it was the most economically value creating the news journalism.
How do the margins work on that? Because you would think that games would be much more accretive on the margins, but they're not.
So, there is nothing quite like the idea of fresh news on the world's most important topics every single day coming from a high-quality place to drive an audience. There's nothing quite like that. And news is just always bringing audience to the Times. On the economics, the majority of our subscribers now we have 13 million subscribers and growing, much larger unsubscribed audience, but 13 million subscribers and growing. The majority of them pay for what we call the news-entitled bundle. So they either have the news product or the news-entitled bundle. So the news-entitled bundle and the news product are more valuable to us, more valuable to the consumer in terms of what they're getting. They're more expensive. So subscription revenue is dominated by the news product. And then in advertising, we're so happy to be in these other giant categories. It's been a real boon to our ad business to have the world's largest sports newsroom and these giant games that tens of millions of people play every week. And cooking and Wirecutter all really, really valuable, but news journalism by far is still the biggest driver of our ad business relative to any other product. And I tell people news is a really specific word and of course it means important things happening, holding power to account on behalf of the public. It means politics and geopolitics and war. But in the case of the New York Times, our news report also includes culture and lifestyle and taste and the world's best television shows and movies and books and fashion. So it's a much broader thing.
In terms of news being such a staunch subscription driver, how do you think about sustaining your momentum while not over-catering to a particular demographic or worldview or socioeconomic type that tends to be a subscriber? How do you keep it broad while also making sure you are attracting the people who pay?
Yeah, what a great question. I think one of the secrets of the Times model for the last, let's call it, decade plus, is that we have refused to let what seems like two opposing ideas actually be in opposition and we've said we have to do both of them. On one hand, we have to make products that are so good, so valuable, have so much gravity in them, coverage and products, that they're worth paying for and that people will subscribe. And on the other hand, we need an enormous audience for everything we do, especially news. So, we have always had what I would call a wide free layer to our products in news, in games, in The Athletic. And in fact, games now, I think I'll get the balance wrong, but slightly more than half our games are paid. The biggest games are free to play. Wordle, Connections, Strands, free to play. In The Athletic, when we acquired it 4 and a half years ago, it was largely behind a paywall. About a million subscribers. That was about as many readers as they had. And The Athletic has the fastest growing audience on the New York Times. It's many millions more than that today. So, for news, for the work to have impact, we've written and produced video and audio extensively about what's happening in Iran right now. What does this memorandum of understanding mean? For that work to have impact, we want that to be not just for subscribers, but for the tens of millions of people who are coming regularly to the Times every week.
I think it was once or a few times that it's around 130 million total addressable market of people who access it or could access your subscription. Is that still the size of the total addressable market that you're eyeing?
I'd say well in excess of that, and that's in terms of where we see among speaking people willingness to pay for news or the other kinds of things that we do, and news is by far the biggest. So it's a number well in excess of that, but I would also say we've got 150 million registrations to the New York Times and counting. We have tens of millions of people who come to site every week, many, many tens of millions. We have many millions of people who open our newsletters every day and every week. So we just have an enormous amount of market signal that the desire is there for it, and I'll tell you, you look at a product like our flagship New York Times app. The way we have run the business for a very long time has been that is mostly where we direct subscribers. So a lot of the activity in the app is subscribers. What you see us doing now is actually making that experience better and better for people who haven't yet subscribed and making it easier to build a relationship with us before you subscribe so you can form a habit, fall in love, and ultimately be a subscriber.
In terms of the success that you've had, you mentioned how much it is attributed to investing in quality journalism, that is always the goal. How much do you attribute that to the luxury of having this interesting dual class share structure? How much of it do you attribute to the Ochs Sulzberger family still being primary stewards and invested in the business versus just the virtue of the mission. Does the business help you get there or is it still a mission-driven thing?
