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New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers

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Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers

#101

Post by Rjevski »

ehsankia wrote: post #44
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

It's surprising to see how small they are. Only 3.8 million subscribers, and you have to imagine that some percentage of that barely reads their content. I wonder if there's public numbers estimating how many people in total read the New York Times, and how it compares to emerging forms of media and entertainment like YouTube. One criticism of New York Times that I've read online is that they won't allow you to cance…

I canceled mine last week exactly because of those dark patterns. They also show ads even if you have a subscription, which sounds very backward to me. I'd love to support them, but those practices don't belong in 2018. EDIT: Oh, looks like the cancellation didn't go through and they charged me for one more month, sweet. I might just go to my bank and tell them to block the source. Or even better, I may have found a…

Go to your bank and chargeback/dispute the transaction. This will make NYT’s card processing fees go up (and enough chargebacks will cause their acquirer bank to drop them).

Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers

#102

Post by gonvaled »

unixhero wrote: post #77
ehsankia wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I canceled mine last week exactly because of those dark patterns. They also show ads even if you have a subscription, which sounds very backward to me. I'd love to support them, but those practices don't belong in 2018. EDIT: Oh, looks like the cancellation didn't go through and they charged me for one more month, sweet. I might just go to my bank and tell them to block the source. Or even better, I may have found a…

Watch out. There may be dragons with that PayPal approach. Although ingenious, and I commend that, you have achieved to end the payments but you have not correctly ended the contract. You may still be liable for the subscription fees, although you're not paying. Probably best to call and terminate the contract the right way.

He has already called them and terminated the contract. They have just not processed the request.

Not paying is a sensible path in this case I would say.

Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers

#103

Post by colordrops »

naturalgradient wrote: post #93

The greatest marketing trick the NYT has ever pulled off is presenting themselves as the last bastion of objectivity in the trump era. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the most recent Sarah Jeong controversy and virtually all reporting on migration, feminism, campus politics etc shows this. Mind you this is from a European perspective where I see almost all reporting about politics here as copying off…

This is why these big papers still exist despite questionable profit mechanisms. They are propaganda mouth pieces. There's a reason billionaires buy newspaper companies.

Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers

#104

Post by gonvaled »

comex wrote: post #14
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

It's surprising to see how small they are. Only 3.8 million subscribers, and you have to imagine that some percentage of that barely reads their content. I wonder if there's public numbers estimating how many people in total read the New York Times, and how it compares to emerging forms of media and entertainment like YouTube. One criticism of New York Times that I've read online is that they won't allow you to cance…

They apparently have no fewer than 130 million monthly readers, though, according to a press release from last year: https://www.nytco.com/year-of-audience/ I̶ ̶g̶u̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶b̶u̶y̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶s̶p̶a̶p̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶d̶i̶v̶i̶d̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶.̶ [edit: that number isn't for physical newspapers, see replies]

OT: how did you strike through? Not described in the formatdoc ... [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers

#105

Post by gonvaled »

PakG1 wrote: post #91
Dwolb wrote: post #76

That’s just insane. This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry. NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever. If NYT is the best at this and can only turn 24M a quarter, almost everyone else must be absolutely bleeding. This would confirm most of the newspapers out there a…

That extrapolates to $84,000,000 profit per year. As a comparison, NYT made $397,536,000 in net income in 2000. https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2... $259,753,000 per year net income in 2005: https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2... That comparison puts it into perspective for me. Until I looked up the comparison, I thought $84M a year profit sounded fantastic.

What was the profit in 2000?

Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers

#106

Post by csomar »

Illniyar wrote: post #83
Dwolb wrote: post #76

That’s just insane. This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry. NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever. If NYT is the best at this and can only turn 24M a quarter, almost everyone else must be absolutely bleeding. This would confirm most of the newspapers out there a…

Is 100M$ a year profit, not revenue but profit, a low amount for a newspaper to make? that seems to me like a fair amount to be at the top. If other newspapers make a tenth of the profit, that should still be an acceptable market? no? Edit: with 3700 employes (per Wikipedia) that's put their profit to be about 27000$ per employee. That's 4 times as much as walmart. From what I can tell it's also more then IBM and pro…

The tech bubble really skewed the perception field of many people.

Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers

#107

Post by cm2187 »

madza wrote: post #97
cm2187 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the Financial Time is starting to drift in that direction...

I’m not alone then. I moved my subscription from the NYT to FT looking for a less politically slanted product but the tone at the FT is definitely going in the same direction. Any suggestions? P.s I have to phone the FT to cancel my subscription apparently.

Well it is only starting to move in that direction, they are clearly running campaigns on certain topics (like feminism), and I skip any article on Trump, Brexit or Boris Johnson. But outside of that it’s still OK.

I’d say the most neutral news will come from news agencies (reuters, afp, etc). There you get the raw material (what happened) without the comments. For business news bloomberg is the (expensive) equivalent. But occasionally there is important original content in the FT so I am not contemplating cancelling my subscription for the time being.

Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers

#108

Post by hkmurakami »

gonvaled wrote: post #105
PakG1 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That extrapolates to $84,000,000 profit per year. As a comparison, NYT made $397,536,000 in net income in 2000. https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2... $259,753,000 per year net income in 2005: https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2... That comparison puts it into perspective for me. Until I looked up the comparison, I thought $84M a year profit sounded fantastic.

What was the profit in 2000?

Net income = profit

Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers

#109

Post by rtpg »

naturalgradient wrote: post #85
unixhero wrote: post #78

Offtopic: I am a European, and I like to read quality journalism. Which do you recommend, a subscruption to Washington Post or NYT?

The Washington Post. The NYT is unapologetically taking a side in the culture war and on many issues (campus politics, feminism, title IX, migration..) will ever only let one side make their point. The Wapo in my observation has a much better mix of both sides.

This is not a proper representation of NYT's opinion board. Beyond the absolutely dishonest stuff of more recent hires to the op-ed board, they have multiple conservatives on the board repeatedly publishing their "actually the problem is the leftist college students" every couple of months. They also have a couple "mainstream liberals" publishing inoffensive (but rarely courageous) pieces that usually match what centrists want to hear.

the WSJ subsidizes a lot of bow-tie conservatives, but the NYT is also granting credibility to a lot of bankrupt lines of thought that have no actual real support in this country. Banning abortion has less than 20% support in the US, yet if you read the opinion pages of the NYT you could only think that both sides have roughly equal support.

Really newspapers shouldn't have opinion pages. It's literally the comments section of their newspaper. Just let journalists call a duck a duck, so then you don't need the opinion pages to point out that, maybe X is bad.

Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers

#110

Post by Accacin »

unixhero wrote: post #78

Offtopic: I am a European, and I like to read quality journalism. Which do you recommend, a subscruption to Washington Post or NYT?

My personal favourite is the Private Eye, but it's very UK-centric as you might imagine. I love them as they often pick things up a few months before other publications start reporting them :)
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