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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

#281

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

throwaway080383 wrote: post #255
madza wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like Wall Street Journal. It's more business-focused, and definitely has a conservative bend, with occasional editorials that are much more out there (the benefits of prayer in school or something), but since I'm left-leaning, it feels pretty good on balance.

The wall Street Journal lost my support after they came out with a shitty hit piece [0] against PewDiePie. I read some of their arguments, but found em to be pretty damn shallow.

Although they came out against him, if you actually watch the source videos I don't think they had a strong case. This was one of the key posts that made me lose trust in WSJ as an organization.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/disney-severs-ties-with-youtube...

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

#282

Post by ameister14 »

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.

Jesus, they went from close to 400 million on 3.6 billion revenue to 96 on 1.6 billion revenue, and it's a success?

Really puts into perspective how tumultuous the last 15 years has been for even the biggest newspapers.

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

#283

Post by nkkollaw »

wild_preference wrote: post #273
nkkollaw wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just my opinion, but things change. Change is not necessarily bad. If smaller newspapers cannot make it, it means they don't offer a good enough service to justify their existence. If they were good and provided value, people would pay for it (like they do the NYT). Given the dismal quality of many small publications--possibly caused by the need to bring people via search engines--I welcome replacing them wit…

“If smaller newspapers cannot make it, it means they don't offer a good enough service to justify their existence. If they were good and provided value, people would pay for it (like they do the NYT).” I don’t think so. What happens is that the price would be too low to overcome the mental barrier of whipping out a wallet to pay for yet another recurring service, something people are only willing to do for larger web…

> I don’t think so. What happens is that the price would be too low to overcome the mental barrier of whipping out a wallet to pay for yet another recurring service, something people are only willing to do for larger websites.

Why does the price have to be low? You can pay yearly, for instance.

However, the main point I was trying to make is that with Patreon people voluntarily contribute $1, $5 or whatever. It hasn't been a problem and it's done every day.

If you're not willing to put up with "whipping out a wallet for yet another recurring service", it means you don't value the product.

Again, I don't even think it's the size of the website because many community-supported projects are 1 solo content creator.

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

#284

Post by nkkollaw »

ghaff wrote: post #256
nkkollaw wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just my opinion, but things change. Change is not necessarily bad. If smaller newspapers cannot make it, it means they don't offer a good enough service to justify their existence. If they were good and provided value, people would pay for it (like they do the NYT). Given the dismal quality of many small publications--possibly caused by the need to bring people via search engines--I welcome replacing them wit…

Nor will independent content creators for the most part go to a lot of boring town and city meetings to find out what's going on--or develop relationships with the various low level officials/administrators. A number of years back my town had a local newspaper that was basically someone's labor of love. It no longer has one so I have essentially no source of information about any town issues I might want to be aware…

> that doesn't matter to me for the most part

I think that's key. When people really care they are the ones who ask the product/project/service how they can support them.

The truth might be that people don't value reading most articles. I know that starting a newspaper is a huge investment, but I guess people just don't care. It might be because we don't have time to read, we get "news" from Facebook, no idea--but that much seems to be true.

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

#285

Post by Consultant32452 »

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…

I disagree, the number of reporters and the diversity of them has increased greatly in the Twitter/YouTube universe. I'd much rather get my news from a 3 hour Joe Rogan podcast with a subject matter expert than a hot take from yet another person from the same small group of universities who have been manufacturing our reporters for generations.

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

#286

Post by tdsamardzhiev »

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 Economist is more Europe-centric, owned by less-shady people/corps, much better structured and written, less biased, and features less crappy filler articles.

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

#287

Post by kpennell »

spondyl wrote: post #57

As much as I like the NYT, as mentioned below, their unsubscribe functionality sucks. I sent them an email last December requesting to unsubscribe. I didn't follow up on it and eventually forgot about it. Eventually, they email me around May to apologise that my email was "delayed" due to a technical glitch they had just discovered. Great but I still never got an actual unsubscription processed. A few months later, a…

Same. They completely ignored my unsubscribe email?

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

#288

Post by patorjk »

thirdsun wrote: post #69
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…

> One criticism of New York Times that I've read online is that they won't allow you to cancel your digital subscription through their website. They force you to call them. I'm not sure if that has changed recently, but that's a pretty questionable dark pattern. They let me cancel via chat a few months ago. Obviously I'd have prefered the press of a button to cancel, but even via chat it was a quick and painless affa…

I'd heard the same story about how hard it was to cancel, but I was also able to cancel through a chat on their website a couple months ago. It was quick and easy.

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

#289

Post by dmix »

cm2187 wrote: post #81
dmix wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, I canceled easily via the web app recently when they decided to doubled down on being another partisan rag like WaPo, feeding off the outrage culture which does well on social media these days. I see it's paid off commercially, no doubt, as it's seemed to have attracted a new wider user base as the lower quality comment sections now reflects on every political article. Including the NYT selected preferred comme…

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

I use WSJ personally.

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

#290

Post by fhood »

megaman22 wrote: post #280

The only part of the New York Times worth paying money for is the crossword. I was a subscriber for a couple years, but after a while you start noticing that all the opinion pieces and non-A section articles seem to be on about a six week loop, and you just keep reading the same piece that's been dusted off and reworked over and over and over again.

What about the news? You know, that thing they do apart from opinion pieces and the crossword puzzles.
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