The bundle includes The New York Times’ full digital subscription, which includes products like Cooking and Games. It is also meant to complement Le Monde in English, a translated version of Le Monde that the publisher debuted in 2022, to entice European readers who do not speak French.
For Le Monde, the initiative is part of a larger effort to scale its subscription business. The French news publisher, the largest in the country, now has 665,000 total subscribers, 600,000 of which are digital-only, according to Grasser. (Le Monde in English has brought in around 13,000 subscribers, Grasser said, a fraction of the 150,000 English-speaking customers it had set as its 2025 goal.)
More broadly, the outlet had set for itself the ambitious goal of netting 1 million subscribers by 2025, a mark that it is also bound to miss. But it continues to work diligently toward its stated aim, and has made ample use of innovative partnerships to do so, including tie-ups with Spotify and HBO in the last year.
Overall, Le Monde Group generated €310 million ($360 million) in 2024, roughly half of which, around €150 million, came from Le Monde alone, according to Grasser. Subscriptions accounted for approximately 50% of that business, or around €75 million, which breaks down further into digital (35%) and print (15%). By the end of 2025, Le Monde anticipates generating around €70 million ($81 million) from digital subscribers, a growth of 33%.
For The Times, the initiative accomplishes several objectives. It nets it a cut of the generated revenue, for one. But more critically, it provides the news publisher, which itself aims to have 15 million subscribers by 2027, a valuable source of data about the international appetite for its subscription product. It also gains access to this data at virtually no cost, as the structure of the Le Monde deal does not require The Times to manage the infrastructure of the bundle.
“This provides The New York Times with exposure to a new market without any customer acquisition cost,” according to Felix Danczak, a subscription marketing analyst who is now head of AI and growth at venture firm Pembroke VCT. “They also get behavioral and engagement data on international readers for free, which will tell them whether or not it makes sense to do this expansion elsewhere.”