For the third quarter, the company earned $44 million in adjusted profit, or 12 cents a share, on $428.5 million in revenue, beating expectations on income. Wall Street had expected a profit of about $40 million, or 10 cents a share, on $428.6 million in sales. Costs rose 5.4 percent, to $401 million, largely from higher newsroom expenses, which included new hires. The company, which is nearing 1,700 newsroom staffers, expects operating costs to increase “to higher levels” starting next year.

The New York Times Company kept the focus on its digital subscriber gains in its report, and Mr. Thompson called the period from July to September “our best-ever third quarter for new digital news subscriptions.” The majority of the new additions, about 209,000, paid for the main news product. The rest came from subscriptions to the Crossword and Cooking products.

Despite the steady rise in online readership, each subscriber brings in less revenue on average as the company continues to offer promotions. The Times sold subscriptions for $1 a week starting in August 2018, and those customers are now seeing their rates rise after the one-year offer expires. Renewals for those readers have been fairly positive, Mr. Thompson said.

The Times also hailed a major change to the company’s pay model, an initiative known internally as Project Redbird. Starting in the third quarter, the publisher limited the amount of free content available to anonymous users to just one article. Readers were then prompted to register to get to more free content, anywhere from five to 10 stories.

That was a key factor in the uptake of new subscribers in the quarter, executives said on an earnings call after the report. Meredith Kopit Levien, the chief operating officer, added that the project was part of long-term planning for a more efficient marketing strategy. The company expects digital subscription revenue to increase by around 15 percent for the fourth quarter.