

“Used To Be Free" is not a good business model - aresant
http://www.andyjenkinsblog.com/2010/01/29/used-to-be-free-is-not-a-good-business-model/

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krschultz
Good point, bad example. The entire NYT pay issue is a lot deeper than he lets
on. I for one will pay for the NYT. In the past I could have said the same for
the WSJ, though these days not so much. Other than those two I can't think of
any other news source I would pay for. To say CNN.com and NYT.com have the
same content on them is just untrue, especially if you live in the New York
area.

As for the comment "It’s reported that the NYT site network has 40 MILLION
unique users, yet they can’t seem to make enough money to support themselves
without charging?

I literally CHOKE thinking of what kind of marketing and sales I could
generate with that kind of audience. I know people who regularly generate
millions of dollars in sales with a mere fraction of that traffic."

Having been in the NYT office a few times, I know that you need to make
billions with a B to pay for that place. They have one of the biggest
buildings in Manhattan, with literally dozens of floors of employees. I can't
even estimate how many people there are, but it is in the thousands.

The problem is not that they suck at selling ads, the problem is that the ad-
supported model just systemically won't work for a paper their size. They
either need to shrink expenses massively or find a new revenue model. So their
calculation is that they can make more money off a few million paying
subscribers than tens of millions of advertising viewers. We shall see. If
they gutted their payroll they would be just another weak news agency so lets
hope they can make the pay model work.

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ubernostrum
_They either need to shrink expenses massively_

They have a large expense in the form of putting news, in ink, onto pieces of
paper and distributing those pieces of paper all over the world. And I know
that's the first thing I'd look at cutting if I were them...

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junklight
I spent most of that article wondering about the formatting - its one thing to
be quirky and idiosyncratic but when it gets in the way of the message it
might be time to tone it down a little.

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wanderr
"I literally CHOKE thinking"

Literally? Really?

