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L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

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Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#471

Post by pgrote »

CydeWeys wrote: post #373
pgrote wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't want to subscribe to just one paper. There are so many good articles in all the papers. A few years back I just went ahead and subscribed to the ones I wanted to support to try to support journalism. It was more affordable than I thought, but there is friction to keep them from taking advantage of you. For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get…

> For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get digital access than just digital access. I live 1000 miles from New York City. The New York Times has nationwide printing and delivery in a lot of cities, so that's actually not that surprising. My parents had it delivered when I was growing up, and that was hundreds of miles from NYC. There's very few other p…

Good point. It just seemed odd to me they would subsidize a print edition, but I guess it was for the advertising. We never opened the blue bag except to recycle the paper.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#472

Post by pgrote »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #449
pgrote wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't want to subscribe to just one paper. There are so many good articles in all the papers. A few years back I just went ahead and subscribed to the ones I wanted to support to try to support journalism. It was more affordable than I thought, but there is friction to keep them from taking advantage of you. For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get…

Spending $100 a month on a grabbag of various newspapers is completely infeasible for the average person. Ergo, it's not a solution to the problem.

I understand what you are saying and am grateful I can afford the monthly cost. The cost I pay is worth the value I receive.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#473

Post by CydeWeys »

londons_explore wrote: post #450
ramblerman wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm just not clever enough, but this reads like a homework assignment saying the same thing OP did much more eloquently: "There is no point in advertising if no one can buy your product right now"

The element I was trying to add but not wording well is that even if some people are still paying for ads, and still have things to sell, they price they pay will be dropping dramatically. Theres a reason Netflix has been advertising so heavily lately - with cheap ad spots, they might as well collect as many customers as possible now.

That, and they're one of the few products that people can still consume easily right now. So I suspect it'd still be worth it for them to increase advertising even if the ads were priced normally, but now that they're super cheap, it's an absolute no-brainer.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#474

Post by CydeWeys »

pgrote wrote: post #471
CydeWeys wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get digital access than just digital access. I live 1000 miles from New York City. The New York Times has nationwide printing and delivery in a lot of cities, so that's actually not that surprising. My parents had it delivered when I was growing up, and that was hundreds of miles from NYC. There's very few other p…

Good point. It just seemed odd to me they would subsidize a print edition, but I guess it was for the advertising. We never opened the blue bag except to recycle the paper.

You've got it exactly right. A print edition is worth a lot more to them in advertising revenue than the digital edition, so it costs less to the customer, even when you factor in the additional cost of printing and distribution. All those local advertising circulars are biiiiig business.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#475

Post by Spivak »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #456
londons_explore wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since ads are a supply-demand market, supply must equal demand. There is nobody who can store ad slots in a warehouse and sell them later. Since publishers are unlikely in the short term to take down their websites just because revenue falls, that has led to prices dropping to near zero on the open market. The only real revenues now are from advertisers who have fixed price per impression or per click contracts, or w…

That's not really how ads are priced, though. Google and FB will be reluctant to see the price of ads go down. They also control the supply of how many ads they put on the page. They make sure the supply of ads for keywords is always less than the demand to fit an optimal price/revenue curve. It's more like OPEC, and less like a free market.

Sure but they aren’t immune to the fact that absolute revenue for both them and the sites hosting the ads falls in proportion which is the point even if they keep price/ad fixed.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#476

Post by soperj »

rgovostes wrote: post #125

The LA Times's investigation into Purdue Pharma in 2016 revealed internal Purdue documents demonstrating the company's culpability in fueling the opioid crisis. > The documents provide a detailed picture of the development and marketing of OxyContin, how Purdue executives responded to complaints that its effects wear off early, and their fears about the financial impact of any departure from 12-hour dosing. I don't h…

Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion and Scott Glover

Wonder if they still work for the Times? Maybe if we rewarded the journalists behind the investigations more than the newspaper itself, they could all bandy together and create something that only does investigative journalism.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#477

Post by qqssccfftt »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #211
CydeWeys wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, spoiler alert, not everyone is young and healthy. In fact, the majority of Americans have at least one comorbidity for coronavirus. > Covid for new york city has a death rate of about 75 per 100k. So far. We're still experiencing hundreds of deaths per day in the city, significantly more than all other causes combined. Your analysis is vastly premature.

> So far. We're still experiencing hundreds of deaths per day in the city, significantly more than all other causes combined. Your analysis is vastly premature Even if it's 150 per 100k, or even if it's 500 or 1000 per 100,000, is that too much? We need to establish an upper bound for the number of deaths we're willing to tolerate. It cannot be "zero". There is a balance between acceptable mortality and economic cons…

Fucking christ. This is what capitalism does to the brain.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#478

Post by adrr »

pgrote wrote: post #370
GnarfGnarf wrote: post #361

Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet? I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article from NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The New Yorker etc., without paying for a subscription. I can't afford to subscribe to all of them. There are not enough hours in the day for getting a return on my investment. New York Times $50/yr Wall Street Journal $100 Bloomberg $420 LA T…

>I don't want to subscribe to just one paper. There are so many good articles in all the papers. A few years back I just went ahead and subscribed to the ones I wanted to support to try to support journalism. It was more affordable than I thought, but there is friction to keep them from taking advantage of you. For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get…

I always wondered if Bloomberg dropped their rates would they make more money. They have appeal outside of people who work in the industry but at $35/m its a very hard hard sell to these people. For that price i could pick up WSJ($20/m),NY times($5/m), and Economist($10/m).

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#479

Post by stronglikedan »

streb-lo wrote: post #412
koheripbal wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We exactly need to reward original investigative journalism like this with subscriptions. So few "journalists" do anything more than repeat twitter trends these days.

The journalists are just doing what their employer asks them too. Their employer is trying to sell papers/clicks. No enough people are willing to pony up for good journalism like the parent comment -- I'm generalizing but most people don't even like to read long form journalism anymore. If we want to know why journalism sucks we need to look in the mirror.

When I look in the mirror, I don't see someone wanting clearly biased, opinionated, decontextualized, or downright unfacts, trying to be spun as news, with zero retractions or apologies when it's called out. Those are the reasons journalism sucks, and it has nothing to do with what I see in my mirror.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#480

Post by CydeWeys »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #431
donohoe wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its been tried many times. They usually fail. This one, Scroll, looks promising: https://scroll.com/

Looks good, $5/mo., perfectly reasonable. I recognize some big names. However, no NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, etc.

They need to have a higher tier at $15/month or something and get the big names onboard too. It's never gonna include Bloomberg too though; they're simply too expensive because they target the businessperson market. Bloomberg's digital subscription costs $35/month. WSJ likely wouldn't be in there for similar reasons, at $20/month.
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