Under his watch, the Times’s digital readership has jumped to nearly 5.7 million subscribers, from half a million. Its annual revenue from digital-only subscriptions topped $450 million at the end of 2019. The Times has said it now has 6.5 million paying readers, more than halfway toward Thompson’s target of ten million subscribers by 2025. In late July, the Times Company announced that Thompson, age 62, will retire as CEO and be succeeded on September 8 by Meredith Kopit Levien, the Times Company’s executive vice president and COO, who was hired as head of advertising by Thompson in 2013.
