The New York Times now has more than one million paid digital-only subscribers, the paper of record's parent company said today. That sounds like a significant accomplishment, given the cries of naysayers when The Times first put up its paywall in 2011. Critics doubted online readers would pay for news; some optimists—and a lot of publishers—sure hoped they would.

“Can a Paywall Stop Newspaper Subscribers from Canceling?” The Atlantic asked in September 2011. “How to Hack the New York Times Paywall… With Your Delete Key,” Mashable explained. (Remember that?) “The New York Times Paywall Is Destined for Failure,” PC Magazine wrote.

Well, apparently, not.

“This is a major milestone for our digital consumer business,” Mark Thompson, president and chief executive of The New York Times company, wrote in a blog post. “We believe that no other news organization has achieved digital subscriber numbers like ours or comparable digital subscription revenue.”

The more than 1 million digital-only subscribers is in addition to 1.1 million print-and-digital subscribers, the company says. (For context, in April 1995, The Times reported a weekly circulation of 1.17 million with its Sunday paper reaching 1.77 million.)

“Times journalism has a broader reach and wider impact now than at any time in our history,” says Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the Times’ publisher. “It is for our many readers around the world, in particular for our many loyal paying subscribers, that we remain fully committed to a continued investment in original, quality journalism.”

So naysayers begone, right? At least some people will pay for news online, funding the Times’ journalism through both subscriptions and the committed eyeballs advertisers seek. Unlike the early days of the web, actually paying for content is no longer unthinkable. People are paying for subscriptions to entertainment—think Netflix and Spotify—even though they could find similar offerings somewhere online for free. Maybe news isn't so different.

And yet the question remains for the Times, as print advertising revenue and print copies sold continue to drop, whether the gains in digital subscriptions will be enough to offset its traditional revenue base. The Times' site sees more than 57 million monthly unique visitors—in other words, a vast majority who don't pay. And the company said in its earnings report this week that only a third of its advertising revenue comes from digital. Even if one million is a nice number, the Times still needs millions more.