
New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers - aaronbrethorst
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/business/media/new-york-times-earnings-subscriptions.html
======
Dwolb
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 are indeed running failed
business models with zero opportunity for success.

The reason this is worrisome is going forward there will be less and less
‘diversity’ in the reporting ecosystem. Instead of 50 professional reporters
confirmed writing about an event, we’ll have 5.

Reality and facts will be more about picking teams than believing the
consensus.

In the age of leaders publicly gaslighting, unrefereed global forums of social
media which can be bought, and massive concentration of wealth at the top,
fewer and consolidated reporting entities will be bad for the republic.

~~~
nothis
There's just too many vital services that can't function with just ad
financing. It's so obvious, that I have a slight hope we'll see new business
models to accommodate for that. The problem is that I don't read a hundred
articles a month by the NYT, I read maybe 5. And then 5 others on 30 different
sites, each.

What I can imagine is a "digital pass" kinda thing that lets you access a
massive amount of content for a reasonable monthly fee and divides it among
members by what you use most or something. Flat-rate pricing is the way to go
on the internet, it is for premium video streaming (Netflix), for music
(Spotify) and games will probably follow soon (it seems Nintendo is switching
the Virtual Console to being part of their subscription model, for example). I
could see it for premium newspapers. It fixes this paralyzing decision of
which subscription you pay for.

~~~
chii
> What I can imagine is a "digital pass"

this makes me think that journalism should be funded out of a commons fund -
like how the BBC is funded publically via taxes.

~~~
orf
The BBC isn't directly funded by taxes in the usual sense (and therefore the
government, which is a tricky situation to be in). It's funded by the
collection of a license required when you have a TV, and it's collected by the
BBC itself (in reality outsourced).

~~~
tjoff
Though in the end there is absolutely no difference.

In Sweden we are abandoning that concept because it is an unfair system and
lots of people have switched to the internet for the same content (and don't
even have a TV).

~~~
orf
It's just semantics, sure, but it does mean the UK's largest broadcaster is
not state-owned and has independence. That's important.

~~~
tjoff
It does not. Politicians have absolute power over funding regardless. They
decide exactly how much BBC can collect and in what circumstances (or they
give BBC the mandate to do it themselves, but they can revoke or change that
at will).

It is just one, insignificant, layer of indirection.

------
TheAceOfHearts
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 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.

~~~
ehsankia
I canceled mine last week exactly because of those dark patterns. They also
show ads even if you have a subscription, which sounds very backward to me.
I'd love to support them, but those practices don't belong in 2018.

EDIT: Oh, looks like the cancellation didn't go through and they charged me
for one more month, sweet. I might just go to my bank and tell them to block
the source. Or even better, I may have found a trick. You can switch your
payment to Paypal, and then Paypal let's you block/cancel reccuring payment.
Let's see if that works.

~~~
joekrill
> They also show ads even if you have a subscription, which sounds very
> backward to me.

So are you also cancelling your cable subscription, any magazine
subscriptions, physical newspaper subscriptions, no longer driving on toll
roads with billboard...?

I'm not saying it's right, or good, or valid--but the standard practice, for
as long as I can remember, for most mediums, is to still show ads for things
you pay for. So I'm not sure how that makes it "backwards".

~~~
criddell
A lot of people have cancelled their cable subscription and get by with ad-
free services like Netflix and Hulu, MLB.tv, etc...

The other things you mention - magazines, newspapers, and billboards - usually
don't track you and build a profile on you so they are less objectionable.

~~~
brlewis
_billboards - usually don 't track you_

With toll roads keeping a record of who travels on them when, it's only a
matter of time until this revenue source gets tapped.

~~~
criddell
There's nothing special about toll roads. A billboard company could put a
camera on their bill board pointed at the nearby road and collect the same
data.

------
spondyl
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, around July while doing a "subscription spring cleaning",
I called them up to cancel it. The guy asked why I was leaving (6 months+ with
no customer support answer) and promptly processed my cancellation.

A few weeks later, I was emailed a "resubscription offer" which genuinely
frustrated me as you might imagine.

~~~
majewsky
> A few weeks later, I was emailed a "resubscription offer" which genuinely
> frustrated me as you might imagine.

If it's a single one, I don't think they're overdoing it. Resubscription
offers are pretty much standard practice. I know some people who regularly
cancel their cellphone contract after the minimum duration in order to get
discount offers for the next contract period.

~~~
spondyl
I get them every other week generally. It was more the timing that annoyed me,
haha

------
greenpizza13
I purchased an annual digital subscription and I'm never even logged into NYT.
I get my news from various sources, including NYT, but I don't go _to_ NYT for
news, it comes to me through Reddit and Apple news.

I consider the subscription more of a donation, because we are living in a
time where the news media has to be supported -- we can't have it die.

I wonder if my use case resonates with other people my age.

~~~
iscrewyou
I’m in the same boat. I open the app maybe once or twice a week. But I support
their work and effort. I’ll pay more once my student loans are done.

------
mey
As a paid sub, really don't like that they still attempt to blast you with
ads.

~~~
glup
Try
[https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper),
should be ad free for subscribers (it's a closer approximation to the actual
print version)

~~~
lkurusa
I would also like to recommend
[https://app.nytimes.com/](https://app.nytimes.com/) , which is a different
approach to the same content.

------
gandutraveler
I love their 'The Daily' podcast. They pick one topic everyday and dive deep
over 30 mins. Overall a happy NYT subscribed for last 6 months. I paid 110$
for 1 year membership and got a free Google home device. Great deal!

~~~
sunsetMurk
That's on my daily rotation too; but I still don't sub to NYT.

After seeing the low NYT subscriber #'s in this thread, it's amazing to me how
much reach 'new media' creators have. There are hundreds of YouTubers that get
more eyeballs daily. Crazy.

------
gearhart
The NYT has been paying roughly the same amount each year for production of
news for the last few years, and a steadily increasing amount of "general,
sales and admin", even as their gross income from subscriptions has shot up,
and their income from advertising has plummeted.[1]

I really struggle with that. That isn't how this is supposed to work. Escaping
the broken advertising model and moving to a reader-funded model is supposed
to give you scope to shake off overheads, to clarify your business's purpose
and to slimline and focus operations to improve the quality of content at the
price point. That's the mantra for the new renaissance of journalism, in which
the NYT has been hailed as a massive success story.

I don't by any means mean to denigrate the NYT - they produce some excellent
reporting, but it seems that from a business perspective there is something
askew here. The Guardian in the UK has managed to do exactly what was expected
- the proportion of their staff who are journalists has increased steadily for
a decade as their revenue split has shifted towards subscription, and their
finances have steadily improved (they're still not in the black, but it looks
like they will be this year, for the first time since the business model fell
apart). On the other side, it seems like the NYT are posting profits, but
without fundamentally reshaping the business.

There is a massive backlash in this thread against dark patterns to prevent
subscriber loss and continued advertising even after subscription. It feels
like the company may be selling the goodwill and brand value that are the
cornerstone to the reader-funded, reader-focused new age of journalism in
order to get their profit margins looking healthy, despite failing to cut
overheads, which is where the profit increases in this new model ought to be
coming from.

I would really, deeply like to be shown to be wrong. We need sustainable,
reader-funded businesses producing great journalism and I want to think the
NYT is one of them.

[1]
[https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2...](https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2017/Final-2017-Annual-
Report.pdf) (page 55)

------
tschellenbach
I pay for the Economist and think it's worth every penny. Wonder how many
magazines/news sites can actually get users to pay for their content though. I
suspect the number is low.

------
bumholio
There seems to be a natural opportunity for ISPs in a certain country to pay
to have all their customers unblocked by major publications relevant to that
public - and have a certain fraction of the customer bill disbursed depending
on online circulation.

I would gladly pay 20% more to my ISP to have hassle free access to major
online publications, knowing that revenue helps journalists produce quality
news, and that I only pay for what I use. instead of New York Times having 3
million subscribers for 9$/a month and lose a good part of that revenue on
customer acquisition and card fees, they could have 100 million subscribers at
30c each, their respective revenue share from a $5-10 ISP bill price increase.
While at the same time, supporting 30 other papers the size of NYT, or
thousands of smaller, local ones.

That's because the NYT online success story is a very rare bird today.

~~~
fingerlocks
I like this idea, but I wonder, would that be a net neutrality violation?
Honest question, because I can easily imagine this being rephrased: “If you
don’t pay for the extra news package, you cannot access NYT for free”.

~~~
bumholio
I think the intent behind net neutrality is not to prevent bundling but
technical discrimination. Your ISP can bundle free Hulu with your data plan,
as long as you can also get Netflix and Youtube at the same quality with no
bandwidth throttling.

So as long as there is no technical discrimination and you can access and
subscribe to other news sources, net neutrality is respected.

~~~
leereeves
There's no such thing as a free Hulu.

If your ISP is taking a share of your subscription fee and giving it to Hulu,
your subscription will cost more.

~~~
bumholio
Yup, that's precisely the idea. The grandparent was concerned that this masked
price increase (for Hulu or for NYT) is a breach of net neutrality.

~~~
leereeves
I've noticed a lot of discussions about net neutrality are actually about
other things like that.

In non-technical circles net neutrality has become a catch-all term for
improving speed, lowering cost, and otherwise regulating ISPs.

I doubt the narrow technical definition will survive.

------
sngz
i would pay for their subscription if they didnt blast me with ads even after
paying.

~~~
notatoad
not only do they advertise to you after you pay, if you are running adblock
they attempt to guilt you into disabling it.

it's especially galling because the washington post costs me $27/year and
doesn't bug me to disable my adblocker, and nytimes is $12/mo plus a guilt
trip about "supporting journalism".

------
taurath
I would pay another couple dollars a month to not have ads in the app (though
I am thankful that they tend to not be hugely intrusive). Overall pretty happy
with the service.

~~~
alpb
Agreed. I hate my NYT subscription exactly for this reason. But I’m tempted to
keep it to support them. What a sad reading experience: they show the same ad
6 times in a short article.

NYT employees: please lobby internally for this. We can pay 2$ more for no
ads. How much % of the ad traffic is subscription users anyway?

------
bdz
I'd sub if the basic package included the crosswords too

~~~
acomjean
It’s strange it doesn’t include the full crossword. I really like the mini
crossword game however and “set” puzzles

------
akhatri_aus
While that's great they should have taken a page out of Nasper's book who used
to look up to the NYT as to what to be in the digital world.

------
chx
I subscribed the moment they hired Susan Flower (susanthesquark). We often
call for the boycott of bad actors so we should reward the good actors, I
feel.

I couldn't subscribe again when they hired Sarah Jeong (sarahjeong) but if I
could, I would do it again in a heartbeat.

~~~
ageek123
Can you say more about why it's a good thing that they hired Sarah Jeong, who
has a history of racist and sexist tweets?

~~~
peteretep
It's interesting, I wasn't at all aware of her until a day or two ago. The
first link I read about her was this:

[https://www.vox.com/2018/8/3/17644704/sarah-jeong-new-
york-t...](https://www.vox.com/2018/8/3/17644704/sarah-jeong-new-york-times-
tweets-backlash-racism)

Which shows her "racist" tweets, and shows how they're only really racist if
you strip away all context for them. It then shows how the alt-right use this
as a tactic.

I found that very interesting, and I also now find it interesting to see who
comments on these. Do you think Vox -- without attacking it as a source here
-- is wrong that these Tweets have been read out of context? Were you aware
that they were? Why do you repeat this talking point?

~~~
Scea91
The context should be provided in the Vox article but it is not. Is there any
article where all of the offensive tweets are available in their context?

~~~
mizzack
Gonna need a lot of context to cover the span of 5 years of those tweets. That
or there is no context and she's just racist.

Burden of proof is on Vox here...

------
paulcole
I pay $40 a year for the crossword only and it's a great deal. Includes the
archives, too!

------
xer
It should say "Thanks to cuts"

------
thrillgore
24 Mil is a really really bad read for the NYT. This means newspapers are in a
bad way.

------
naturalgradient
The greatest marketing trick the NYT has ever pulled off is presenting
themselves as the last bastion of objectivity in the trump era.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the most recent Sarah Jeong
controversy and virtually all reporting on migration, feminism, campus
politics etc shows this. Mind you this is from a European perspective where I
see almost all reporting about politics here as copying off talking points
from the far left.

This is the true genius of their marketing though: They are actually as
polarized as any other source in the culture war, but market themselves to an
audience that likes to think of themselves as rational, objective, sensible.

~~~
ericdykstra
Maybe in the past the NYT had earned their reputation as a trustworthy source,
but they're certainly eroding that reputation at a blistering pace. They might
survive as a partisan publisher, plenty do, but I always go into NYT articles
expecting bias in reporting.

It's not just the politics, either. I ran across this article from just a
couple of days ago and couldn't believe it got past an editor:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/well/why-take-diet-
advice...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/well/why-take-diet-advice-from-
a-cave-man.html)

> Keep in mind that the life expectancy of people before the advent of
> agriculture 15,000 years ago rarely reached or exceeded 40, so their risk of
> developing the so-called diseases of civilization is unknown.

To completely ignore how infant mortality affects life expectancy shows a
complete lack of knowledge of history or statistics.

~~~
nl
I don't understand your point about the Paleo diet.

I just Googled, and apparently the "ignore how infant mortality affects life
expectancy" is a talking point of pro-Paleo websites. This is a good point
(although it seems to ignore the high mortality rate of women during
childbirth), but seems pretty irrelevant to the rest of the article.

Ignoring that, it seemed a reasonably well thought-out counterpoint to another
fad diet.

~~~
paulgb
I think the issue is that 40 years seems to be extrapolated from an average,
but the distribution of human lifespans (especially in pre-modern times) is
bi-modal so the average doesn't tell you much about how long they lived
conditioned on reaching adulthood. I found mostly questionable-looking paleo-
diet related results as well, but to their credit the chain of citations led
back to peer-reviewed research such as this:

> we see that on average 57 percent, 64 percent, and 67 percent of children
> born survive to age 15 years among hunter-gatherers, forager-
> horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers. Of those who reach age
> 15, 64 percent of traditional hunter-gatherers and 61 percent of forager-
> horticulturalists reach age 45. The acculturated hunter-gatherers show lower
> young adult mortality rates, with 79 percent surviving to age 45,
> conditional on reaching age 15.

[http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/gurvenlab/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.ed...](http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/gurvenlab/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.anth.d7_gurven/files/sitefiles/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf)

~~~
nl
Sure, I agree it's a good point. But it does seem to be a fairly minor point
in the whole article, and I really don't understand what the OP's point was.

Was it just they didn't like the criticism of paleo? Because honestly, to me
publishing reasonably well thought out criticism of anything seems exactly
what a good newspaper should do.

------
kyleblarson
I canceled my subscription recently after they hired a racist tech editor.

------
bufferoverflow
Yeah, but now that they refused to fire the openly racist Sarah Jeong, their
credibility went to zero for me. I hope they lose subscribers over this.

------
megaman22
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.

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

------
unixhero
Offtopic: I am a European, and I like to read quality journalism. Which do you
recommend, a subscruption to Washington Post or NYT?

~~~
naturalgradient
The Washington Post. The NYT is unapologetically taking a side in the culture
war and on many issues (campus politics, feminism, title IX, migration..) will
ever only let one side make their point. The Wapo in my observation has a much
better mix of both sides.

~~~
rtpg
This is not a proper representation of NYT's opinion board. Beyond the
absolutely dishonest stuff of more recent hires to the op-ed board, they have
multiple conservatives on the board repeatedly publishing their "actually the
problem is the leftist college students" every couple of months. They also
have a couple "mainstream liberals" publishing inoffensive (but rarely
courageous) pieces that usually match what centrists want to hear.

the WSJ subsidizes a lot of bow-tie conservatives, but the NYT is also
granting credibility to a lot of bankrupt lines of thought that have no actual
real support in this country. Banning abortion has less than 20% support in
the US, yet if you read the opinion pages of the NYT you could only think that
both sides have roughly equal support.

Really newspapers shouldn't have opinion pages. It's literally the comments
section of their newspaper. Just let journalists call a duck a duck, so then
you don't need the opinion pages to point out that, maybe X is bad.

~~~
nieksand
Looks like:

ban = 20%

limited = 50%

anything goes = 30%

[https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx)

So 70-30 for at least some form of restrictions on abortion.

~~~
leereeves
Also notable from that poll, 48% of respondents consider themselves pro-
choice, 48% pro-life.

If rtpg means banning abortion even when it would save the life of the mother
or in cases of rape, it's true that few people support a ban that extreme.

But if rtpg means banning abortion _except_ when it would save the life of the
mother or in cases of rape, both sides do have roughly equal support.

------
nicodjimenez
Good for them! But is it good for us? I don't know how I feel about news
organizations (liberal or conservative) profiting from the Donald Trump era.

~~~
robotron
Yes, it's good for us. The more sources of journalism the better.

------
sigfubar
Why would anyone subscribe to NYT when the content is readily available online
behind a trivially bypassed paywall?

~~~
dubrocks
Not as trivially-bypassed on mobile, I presume.

~~~
mehrdadn
Open in incognito? (Not advocating bypassing, just responding to your
comment.)

------
commenter1
Why would anyone pay for news is beyond my understanding. I pay for things I
enjoy, not things that make my blood boil.

------
lerie
I just disable javascript to read full articles from news places like this
that force subscriptions.

or maybe I just dont understand why people would subscribe digitally? Are
there different articles?

I think people have moved away from what the internet is supposed to be, which
is a way to share information, not force people to pay for information :/

