"Digital revenue overtook print for the first time, and digital subscription revenue, long our fastest-growing revenue stream, is also now our largest"
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/business/media/new-york-times-earnings.html
Cannot read it, it is behind a paywall ;)
Must be geo-based? Or maybe my browser is so armored it just gives up and lets me in.
(BTW, I have yet to subscribe to any news service. I'm able to get into 98% of them.)
Here's the salient part; PROFIT
Fourth-quarter revenue was $509.4 million, a 0.2 percent rise from 2019. Adjusted operating profit rose 1.4 percent from the fourth quarter of 2019, to $97.7 million, and 0.9 percent over the year, to $250.6 million.
I went in with a browser that did not have bypass paywalls on, so got the "wall".
tickled me with the revenue going up. Turning it back on, and of course, I am in. Why anyone pays I don't understand!
Actually, NYT is doing so well, they recently put out a plea asking readers to subscribe to *other* papers. Specifically local papers. The gist of it was: "This new media world is great for huge players like us, but destroying local papers. However, you're going to miss it when your local paper goes belly up, so please go subscribe there."
And some calculations show that it's cheaper in the long run to subscribe to your local paper than to not subscribe and let the paper go out of business.
QuoteWhat's more, borrowing costs increased more -- by 0.12 percentage points -- in states with low-quality governance after a newspaper stopped running.
https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-newspapers-closure-costs-government.html
That's just borrowing costs. It doesn't count undetected fraud or things like that.
It makes sense. Not looked at it that way. I am a fan, for all its faults of our BBC.
It keeps being threatened, but I always want to support it as a reasonably independent source. Local News will be the same I guess.
Should they be state-funded? There are dangers at a local level, but then I doubt they are really whiter than white now.
>>Why anyone pays I don't understand!
For the simple reason that I hate ads. I realize that argument appeals to about 0.0001% of readers. I don't know why the others pay.
I don't mean that I hate *seeing* ads. I mostly don't see them since my ad blockers are effective. It's that I hate the Buzzfeedification of the media universe and what it is doing to public discourse. I blame QAnon and all that as much on Buzzfeed and the race to the bottom with listicles and clickbait in order to sell ad views as on Facebook and Twitter.
Also, for most of my life, my livelihood depended on people respecting copyright and not making illegal copies. There's no way I would have done the work I did for free and the money has to come from somewhere, and what doesn't come from grants comes from people and institutions who buy the books.
So when I got aggressive with my ad blockers, I made a deal with myself: I would block any and all ads that I could, but I would respect any publisher that puts up a paywall and would make no effort to circumvent it. If they ask me to turn off my ad blockers in order to access their site, I go away. If they ask me for money, I either pay or go away.
I would love to see a media ecosystem where it was harder to get around paywalls, but the cost of paying for access was significantly lower. Part of what is not mentioned in the NYT article is that they lowered their teaser subscription rate to $1/week for the first six months. I will unsubscribe after the trial period, but for now I have full access for $1/week, which I'm happy to pay at several different media outlets, most importantly the Mariposa Gazette, our local paper (less than $50/year).
There are ads on the internet?
QuoteThere are ads on the internet?
Funny Man :)
Ergo you make me feel bad. But not quite bad enough to pay for the NYT.
I guess we do buy subscriptions still, and the only access I have ever had to the NYT has been the internet and I am never likely to buy it. A UK paper yes.
It's nice to read the odd article, as with the Washington Post, both are interesting, but I would never want to pay for either. There are others too. I think Google has got us used to being able to access the world's news, and that is important for democracy too.
Which is an interesting problem to Square? Do you all access the BBC? I pay for that.
>Do you all access the BBC?
BBC News several times a day, usually.
>I pay for that.
I don't.
QuoteI don't.
I think it is important you don't. There used to be a world service broadcast. I think it's still there.
>BBC
Some of their web videos seem to be geo-locked but I truly dislike videos (1. Too slow to review. 2. No way to copy/paste the points I want to relay to th3core.) and haven't tried to unlock them for viewing.
We digitally subscribe to the NYT and a local paper basically to support journalism.
I have been told there are ads on the internet. I think it must be true, because sometimes I see big grey boxes that say "Ad".
Quote from: Rupert on February 04, 2021, 06:26:48 PM
Ergo you make me feel bad. But not quite bad enough to pay for the NYT.
Don't get me wrong. 99% of what I read, I do not pay for. I have
Le Monde in my RSS feed as a daily read and I have never given them a cent and don't plan to. On the other hand, I donate monthly to two public radio stations that I never listen to, but consider that my podcast subscription for the podcasts they produce or sponsor.
I'm just saying that in my case, I block ads and if they block my access in return, that's fine. I am not going to escalate by trying to circumvent their paywall. They respect (unwillingly of course) my decision to not see their ads and I respect their decision to block me.
I guess it's like this. If you own a bunch of land in the country, I'll normally feel free to take a walk on your land and I don't much care if you like it or not. If you don't actively try to stop me, I'll walk there. But if you have a silly little fence and a gate and want to charge for access, I'll either pay or walk somewhere else. I won't take a ladder around back and let myself in so that you have to put in a prison fence with razor wire to keep me out.
There's no way I'm going to subscribe to every paper or journal or website where I read 1-3 articles per month. So what I would love is a viable system that let me pay some reasonable amount and large numbers of publishers would participate. So I could pay $20/mo for unlimited access (less than I pay now for very limited access) and get it all with no ads.
Or possibly I could top up my account and pay $0.02/article. I once read that someone guessed that Huffpost earned something like $0.004/pageview, so 1/5 what I'm offering.
Brave tried this as have others, but there is a chicken and egg problem. I don't top up my account because no publishers sign up because the user base is too small because no publishers sign up because the user base is too small... ad infinitum.
In some cases I think they are stupid to wall off their websites (obscurity being the bigger threat than theft), but I also wanted my publisher to give away electronic versions of my books for free and it just is not sustainable because margins are so thin in publishing.
QuoteIt's nice to read the odd article, as with the Washington Post
Most or many let you see a few per month before blocking you. Or they let you read the first part of the article, which generally has the most important parts.
QuoteDo you all access the BBC? I pay for that.
Podcasts, yes. Thank you for your largess. They do have ads when downloaded outside the UK. I know how to fast forward through podcast ads, but not how to automatically erase them. This may explain why podcasts are booming.