

Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle - troystribling
http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs-twice-as-much-as-sending-every-subscriber-a-free-kindle

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Herring
Dividing total printing costs by number of subscribers is very misleading.

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mlinsey
I'm reposting my comment (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459211>) from
the previous submission on this topic
:<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459017>

Note that this article compares the costs of printing _all_ copies of the New
York Times to sending only _subscribers_ free Kindles.

I started this post expecting to explain how this made the NYT's printing
costs sound a bit more reasonable. Then I found that according to Wikipedia,
which cites a 2007 release by the paper itself, the daily circulation of the
New York Times is 1,000,665 Daily and 1,438,585 on Sundays. I am honestly
quite surprised that the number of papers sold at newsstands and vending
machines is therefore under 200K on weekdays. Using these figures and building
off of SAI's estimates, the cost of printing copies just for subscribers is
probably about $503 million, or still enough for just under 1.7 kindles per
subscriber.

Note also that neither bandwidth costs nor the costs of delivering papers is
counted. I presume factoring this in would make the print newspaper look even
worse.

As a reply, Kaizyn pointed out that people are more likely to share copies of
the paper NYT than their Kindle. I think that's a good point, but I'm not sure
how to account for it at all.

~~~
Herring
1.7 kindles per subscriber per year, you mean. It's probably cleaner to work
out how long it would take to recoup that 'investment' assuming subscriber
readership & ad revenue don't change. He also assumes wages outside the
newsroom are all in printing, which makes no sense.

The article says 2 kindles over a year's costs, so his t=0.5 yr. If cutting
out 4/5 of the dead tree edition doesn't do much outside raw materials,
t=6yrs, which is crazy.

Thing is it's all irrelevant. The assumptions & lack of information make the
calculations useless. We already knew t>0, that's not a surprise.

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mattmcknight
But given that they are making their money primarily as an advertising
delivery device, how effective are ads on the Kindle?

One large advantage of the newspaper, as an ad delivery medium, is its size.
It's hard to go from a huge visually scannable paper to a paged set of
articles, where the ads invade the optimal page size.

I am completely sick of advertising, but it's hard to pay for a large news
gathering operation without it.

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jonknee
I'm guessing people would put up with a fair amount of advertising if they got
a free Kindle. I read a PDF copy of our locale free daily and the ads are
still quite noticeable. I know it's not on a kindle, but if you flip through
page by page you are still going to notice things. The ads would have to be
reformatted, to be more inline, but that's doable.

And it's twice as cheap to buy a Kindle in year 1. Year two is $644m in
savings. That's a lot of ads that don't have to be sold, a lot of sales staff
who don't have to be selling it, etc etc.

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jshajan
Printing news should have gone out of style a long time ago. We should have
had, for some time now, a lightweight electronic notepad-sized device that
just downloads thew news every morning that we grab on our way out the door.
The money spent on printing is unnecessary and obscene. While I concede, for
those who grew up on printed news, there's a certain comfort in the
experience...there's just so much of a benefit to a digital version of it..aka
the internet!

~~~
blackguardx
I find it very nice to be able to sit at a coffee shop or restaurant and read
a newspaper without worrying about spilling food/drink on it. You can't do
that with electronics.

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jerf
"You can't do that with electronics." - _yet_. Electronics have come in hard,
bulky cases simply because they have to anyhow. Shrinking them a little bit
still means you have a hard, bulky case.

But we're within spitting distance of being able to build something like the
Kindle as a flexible, waterproof thing thicker than paper, but not too much
thicker than paper, with a single bit of bulky electronics attached to the
bottom for the battery. Not sure it'll ever work as a broadsheet, which wasn't
really chosen for _your_ convenience, but a nice 8x11 or A4 sheet of paper,
sure.

Now, when I say "spitting distance", I still mean "5 to 10 years". But it no
longer requires fundamental breakthroughs, just feasible advances.

(Also, don't read my specs too literally. We'll have to play with the design
space before we work the optimal design out, but "something I can read over
coffee" will definitely be a niche.)

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tsally
So send every subscriber a free Kindle.

(Seriously... or at least a Kindle like device that hooks into NYTimes
content. It's a business move that News organizations should have made a long
time ago.)

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Zev
What would you (ie: anyone who thinks NY Times should do this) suggest for
colleges that give away free copies of newspapers to students?

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silentbicycle
1\. Many people buy the NYT from newsstands, as noted elsewhere.

2\. What about other costs, such as tech support?

