The New York Times has begun bundling its digital subscription with The Economist, a demonstration of the paper’s increasing willingness to partner with other organizations to reach its 15 million-subscriber goal within the next two years.
The paper quietly rolled out the bundled subscription with the UK-based finance and business-focused publication earlier this year, but hasn’t publicized the deal. The bundle, which only appears to be available for a limited number of readers in the UK for now, offers annual subscribers to The Economist an extra annual subscription to The New York Times for £167 a year, increasing automatically to £239 in the second year. The bundled subscription is currently less than an annual digital subscription to The Economist alone.
The offer is part of the Times’ broader push towards bundling. Crucially, many of those bundles have focused on content outside the Times’ core news offerings. In January, Axios reported that the Times had begun reaching out to a handful of US publications such as the entertainment site The Ankler about partnerships around non-news products, such as New York Times Games. When the Times has offered to bundle its journalism, it has largely been working with non-US or non-English publications. Last year, the paper began offering joint subscriptions with daily newspapers in Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Ireland.
The partnership with The Economist is notable, however, for that publication’s increasing editorial proximity to the Times’ lane. The publication covers finance, culture, and news, in particular the war in Ukraine. The Economist has also expanded into the US in recent years, building out its Washington presence and trying to be a more central part of the American media conversation.
Bundling its own products has helped the Times vastly outpace its print competitors. The paper added over 230,000 digital subscribers in the second quarter of 2025, helping it close in on 12 million subscribers. Over half of the paper’s digital subscribers are multi-product users, adding on subscriptions to games, podcasts, and The Athletic.