The Wall Street Journal joins The New York Times in the 2 million digital subscriber club

Earnings season means it’s time for successful publishers to brag about their digital subscription numbers. On Thursday, it was The New York Times Company’s turn, throwing out some big numbers: 5,251,000 total subscriptions across all print and digital, 4,395,000 total digital subscriptions (including Cooking and Crosswords), and 3,429,000 digital news subscribers.

Perhaps most impressive to me: There’s little evidence that the potential customer base for a Times digital news subscription has topped out. That 3.429 million total at the end of 2019 was up from 2.713 million a year earlier, a strong 26 percent rate of growth.

On Friday, it was News Corp’s turn, announcing that its Wall Street Journal had topped 2 million digital subscriptions for the first time, and that Dow Jones — which also includes Barron’s, its news wires, Factiva, and some other information businesses — had topped 3.5 million digital subs.

News Corp CEO Robert Thomson seemed itching for a fight with the Times in the earnings release, mentioning its rival five times in its first six paragraphs:

Dow Jones also surpassed The New York Times in revenue growth in the final quarter of calendar year 2019, while continuing to increase its profit contribution…

“Dow Jones revenues increased by 4% in the most recent quarter, compared to 1% for The New York Times,” said Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp. “Dow Jones is significantly more digital than The New York Times, with 62% digital revenues as we reported at fiscal year-end, including our growing Professional Information Business.”

The total number of digital subscriptions at Dow Jones grew by 17% in the most recent quarter, with digital subscribers to The Wall Street Journal rising 13%. At Dow Jones, digital accounts for approximately 57% of consumer circulation revenues versus 44% for The New York Times…

Dow Jones advertising revenues in the October-December quarter also outpaced The New York Times, with digital advertising picking up thus far in the first quarter of calendar year 2020.

Given the fight they’ve chosen to pick here, I should note that the Times’ digital subscription growth rate is still much better than the Journal’s. News Corp reports digital subs slightly differently than the Times does — the average over a quarter as opposed to the total at the end of it. But across 2019, the Journal’s digital subscribers increased from 1,709,000 to 1,929,000 — a net gain of 220,000 and a growth rate of 12.8 percent. The Times, as mentioned above, went from 2,713,000 to 3,429,000 — a net gain of 716,000 and a growth rate of 26.4 percent.

I’ve written before about the difficulty inherent in trying to be someone’s second digital news subscription — the Times and Quartz, the Post and The Atlantic, the Journal and your local daily. In those cases, product differentiation is key — which is one reason I suspect the Journal will come out of all this fine, given its business focus.

Does “winner take all” mean it’s just a handful of national papers that can thrive while the 1,000-plus local papers struggle mightily? Or will it mean that there’ll really be just one winner in its general-interest category, the Times?

I don’t know; I’d love the Post to release a boffo subscription number tomorrow to ease my mind. But the Times does seem to be running away from the field — not just its local competitors, but its Acela ones too.