
How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall? - leoc
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2011/03/28/how-did-the-new-york-times-manage-to-spend-40-million-on-its-pay-wall/
======
dandelany
Yikes. Probably $10k worth of code, and $39,990,000 worth of strategizing,
consulting, Powerpoint presentations, and general hand-wringing about the
"death of the news industry".

All I know is, if I'd spent $40mil on a paywall, I'd be damn sure it was
written to filter on the server-side, not with a client-blockable overlay like
they have supposedly implemented.

~~~
patio11
I would certainly love to slag on excessively top-heavy project management and
the New York Times, but I think you're being a little unfair here. Many of
those "What do we build?" discussions are _critical_ and non-obvious.

To just look at one little piece, this decision has massive SEO implications.
I have some notion of what people qualified to comment on them cost. I'm not
nearly the caliber of firm the NYT would stake their future livelihood on by
engaging for this kind of work, but even absent that, the minimum possible
scope for that SEO engagement blows $10k out of the water.

~~~
elliottcarlson
Indeed, however even with SEO consultants brought in, and even a Snake Oil
Consultant or two, the $40 million pricetag is insane. Obviously $10k is no
where near realistic when it comes to all the planning between however many
stakeholders there are in the site, as well as figuring out ads management and
what not.

Realistically, we would all still be shocked if they had paid $2 million
total.

~~~
Retric
Considering how important this is to the future of the NYT 10 million would
have been completely reasonable. Don't forget sometimes a 1% better solution
can really be worth 100 million.

~~~
shpxnvz
It's only reasonable if that $10M actually buys you something more valuable
than what you get for $2M, even by 1% as you state. I think many of us are
questioning whether that could possibly be the case.

I'm genuinely interested in hearing some ideas of what $8M of extra investment
could buy in this case?

------
holman
For those of you in a different country that doesn't use the Dollar: The New
York Times just blew almost an entire Color on their paywall.

~~~
notahacker
They also could have paid these staff for at least another four years.
[http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/10/19/new-york-
times...](http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/10/19/new-york-times-job-
cuts-read-the-memo/).

Past experience at an old media company (who would have loved to have had a
spare £40 million to spend delaying project launches) suggests the
redundancies were people too busy doing productive work to produce job-saving
Powerpoint presentations on how they were enhancing stakeholder value by
synergising workflow processes.

~~~
coolgeek
To be fair, it was only £25 million

------
ugh
Well, if you are a hammer everything looks like a nail.

Getting people to pay for a newspaper on the web is actually not a programming
problem and Bloomberg does not say that they spent $40-50 million on writing
code. They spent that money “on the project”.

I’m not claiming that they succeeded or will succeed or that $50-50 million is
an appropriate amount of money for such a project. All I’m saying is that the
actual technical implementation of a pay wall is by far the tiniest challenge
of the project.

~~~
groks
What are the greater challenges of the project, that account for the majority
of the $50 million?

~~~
ugh
I don’t know whether you have to spend a large portion of $50 million on it
but market research seems like the most important part of such a project to
me.

Are there pay walls that work well? What design patterns do these share? Is it
possible to work together or meet those who built successful pay walls? What
about SEO and advertising? (The next questions are best answered with an
already existing firm knowledge of the possible alternatives:) What are
current and potential New York Times readers willing to pay for online
content? How do they want to pay? What online services are they currently
paying for and how much?

Something that will (likely inevitably) also cost much is tying it all
together. Meetings among high-level management are expensive but changing the
business model is critical. My suggestion would be to have a small low-level
independent team – preferably people who are working on the research or will
be working on the implementation – come up with (very few) alternatives and to
pitch those to management, limiting management’s involvement in the details.
If possible the developers should probably also implement several alternatives
and A/B test those.

It’s pretty clear to me that actual coding is only a small part of it. (Saying
that it is a “tiny” part was a bit of an exaggeration.)

------
DanielBMarkham
To the author, this is very simple. Yet we programmers and hackers continue to
have a hell of a time with it.

The amount of code involved, the value of the solution, and the cost of change
are completely different things. It's like saying "I paid too much for my
haircut last week. They only cut a small amount of hair!" You're confusing
things that are not related.

Let's say you had a magic wand and there was zero programming involved. It
still could easily take 40 Mil to fix up a paywall -- and it might not be
wasted money. There are lots of folks involved who need to sign off on the
project, and changing parts of a business model isn't a trivial thing (nor
should it be)

Yes, seems like way too much to me too, but that's because of my judgment on
the business risks and evaluation of change involved, not because of how hard
it might be to code up in a weekend. If anything, it tells the story of an
organization that is not nimble and that is very unsure of how to proceed, not
an organization that spends too much on software. You're reading the wrong
lesson into this.

------
maqr
It can be very expensive to build a solution for an unsolvable problem.

~~~
noonespecial
Plus, at this level of management, "what color should the bike-shed be" may
well indeed be unsolvable.

------
crikli
It's silly to us hackers that the paywall can be defeated with Firebug/CSS/JS,
etc...

But does that mean that the NYT has failed in their mission to monetize their
content?

I'm not sure it does. I _still_ have conversations with lots of folks people
where I have to explain the difference between a browser, the internet, and
that blue "e" on their desktop.

The NYT probably has solid demographics on their target market, and I'm
betting that folks like us that know enough to laugh at their paywall
implementation are in the very low single digits percentage-wise.

I'm just spitballing here, but I could see someone standing in front of the
client saying, "Look, your demos say that 1.1% of your target market is going
to be able to circumverent the paywall. The oooold reach around. That
represents X dollars in lost revenue. The other 98.9% of your target demo is
going to use the system as designed because they're not even going to
understand what the nerds are talking about. However, our content is still
going to get indexed by Google, which as we know drives X percent of our
traffic. We're still going to serve ad impressions and content to that 98.1%
of users, resulting in the X% conversion rate bizanalytics is projecting."

My point is that the solution might be technically laughable but still meet
the business objective.

------
aeontech
So, let's say a wildly over-staffed (for this kind of project) team of 10
programmers for a year, on an average salary of $120K. That's still only 1.2M.
Let's say another 800K on hardware. Does that mean the other 38M went to
corporate, management, kickbacks to ensure that the right company got the
contract?

If that's the case, it's even more depressing if the vast majority of the
money didn't even go to people who had absolutely nothing to do with the
actual implementation.

Can the shareholders of the NYT demand an investigation into this? Seems like
this kind of ridiculous overspending should be something that would concern
them.

~~~
rorrr
You are very wrong about the size of the team that was involved. My guess
would be

1) 10 to 20 developers

2) 2 to 3 sys admins

3) 10 to 30 managers

4) 15 to 20 executives, from low level, all the way to the top.

5) Outside consulting design team that billed them at $500/hour.

Q: How did they get so spend that money?

A: Endless meetings.

Executive salaries add up very very quickly. Executives and managers
absolutely loooove meetings, that's how they can pretend to do anything
useful.

In reality they spend hours discussing the color and the thickness of the line
under the logo and bullshit each other, while developers are half-asleep from
boredom or are wondering - "WTF, did this dude just discover the internet? and
why is he in charge?"

~~~
maigret
UX specialists and UI architects/designers discuss things like thickness of
lines. Also don't discount the sheer size of their website, making "simple"
changes a whole different thing than on a private small website. You also
forget testers, project managers, and lawyers etc. Blaming execs and managers
is just too simple I think. That would be easy to fix.

~~~
rorrr
> _UX specialists and UI architects/designers discuss things like thickness of
> lines_

You wish.

I'm yet to see a company where (often clueless) executives don't override
decisions of professionals.

I know a _huge_ company where the CEO spent five weeks changing the curve of
one of the letters in the logo, there were something like 25 iterations. Want
to calculate how much that cost?

~~~
ThomPete
My guess is unfortunately zero USD.

Iterations often end up costing the designers their margin. Especially if the
company has a good name.

~~~
nuxi
CEO presumably spent five weeks doing something that was NOT his job, and was
paid for it. I'm guessing the cost was substantial.

~~~
lsc
You are assuming that positive value is generated when the CEO does things
that are his job. Now, when a good CEO does his or her job, that is probably a
good assumption. But a CEO who is willing to spend that much time on graphic
design is not a good CEO. If he was that incompetent when it came to
everything else, most likely the company was better off having him tied up on
a project where he couldn't do that much damage.

~~~
nuxi
Upvoted - I agree on the first part. As for his incompetence, the worst thing
that a company can do is "promote" someone to a position where one "can't do
much damage". It's damaging for morale of employees who are competent and hard
working, but not properly rewarded for their work when compared to "non-
damaging" ones.

------
shadowsun7
I think there's an understandable case to be made for the spending (when your
future hinges on your digital properties, you can't really blame management
for being scared and wanting outside advice - and lots of it.)

But it's hard to see how the Times can work this out, and it's worth
remembering that the paywall is a _desperate_ attempt to do this. Desperate
people tend to pay more for even the simple things. There aren't any models
worth using - if the Times is to get this right, it has to invent one on its
own dollar.

Is there hope? Monday Note's Frédéric Filloux thinks that the NYT can be a
digital-only enterprise: [http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/03/27/the-nyts-
melting-iceber...](http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/03/27/the-nyts-melting-
iceberg-syndrome/)

    
    
      Let’s stop a moment and behold the printed New York Times’ true gem: its Sunday edition. 
      It changes everything in our look at the paper’s digital equation:
      - Sunday circulation is 54% higher than on weekdays (1.35m vs. 877,000).
      - It’s an expensive package: $5.00 in New York, $6.00 elsewhere in the country.
      - Sunday copy sales bring five times more money than any weekday.
      - Advertising-wise, some analysts say the Sunday NYT accounts for about 50% of 
       the paper’s entire advertising revenue.
    

He suggests that it cuts out its daily paper, keeps the SundayEedition
cashcow, and switch everything else to digital-only.

But it takes a lot of courage to do something so drastic. Till then, $40
million seems regrettably understandable - the price of being scared and
unsure of one's future.

~~~
pkteison
csmonitor.com made this digital leap. Would be interesting to see what it did
to their finances.

------
danilocampos
Imagine if they'd instead invested that money in restructuring themselves for
a viable, 21st century business model. I mean, it's a big ship to turn and you
probably need a lot more than $40m.

But at least they'd be closer to cracking it than they are now.

~~~
natrius
Your assertion is based on faith, not facts. You believe that there's some
mythical "21st century" business model that will save journalism with no
evidence to back that up. If asking readers to pay for news doesn't qualify as
sufficiently modern, I'm really not sure what you have in mind. Please
elaborate.

(Personally, I think donations sought by non-profits are a better way to fund
journalism, but that is decidedly pre-21st century.)

~~~
danilocampos
Saving journalism and saving The New York Times Company are two very different
things. I'm focused on the latter in the above comment. The fact that
businesses exist and make money producing digital content after 1999 is
effective proof that survival is possible.

~~~
davidw
We're in a transition phase. Doubtless, buggy whip manufacturers survived a
few years past the introduction of the Ford Model T as well. Whether that's an
apt comparison for producers of information goods is too early to say - I
don't think it's likely to be accurate, but I don't know what the future holds
either, and I think things are still changing.

~~~
rhizome
Thing is, there are still buggy whip manufacturers that have been in business
since then. I don't know if Jedediah's Buggy Whips could have _planned_ to
survive the automobile, but they have. The New York Times I'm sure would like
to be the buggy whip of journalism.

The Gray Lady is casting about wildly (probably before it _really_ matters) in
hopes of avoiding an uncertainty on par with the 1908 whip market.

~~~
davidw
> The New York Times I'm sure would like to be the buggy whip of journalism.

No, they don't. The few that are around are in an extremely niche business
that most of the world does not need or care about. They're for hobbyists.

It'd be interesting to know if the buggy whip manufacturers from 100 years ago
actually survived (I sort of doubt it, but don't know) or were recreated/re-
formed to serve the niche/hobbyist market, which I think would require a
different sort of business and mentality.

~~~
rhizome
I did not invent "Jedediah's Buggy Whips," they are a real company that for
all I've been able to find has been continuously in business since 1853.

~~~
davidw
Interesting. Maybe a small number of them managed to change with the times (my
guess is they didn't call it "pivoting"), but I still can't seriously think
that the NYT wants to be the equivalent of "Jedediah's Buggy Whips". Right now
they're more like Ford (well maybe not that big, but they are at the very
least national in their reach and relevance), and I don't think they'd like to
take the step down in size and importance.

------
jsz0
It's a fairly complex problem. They probably wanted to model a bunch of
different systems to 'prove' they were making the right choice. Ultimately
that will determine who to congratulate or blame in 6 months so you can
imagine everyone involved in the process was interested in staking a claim to
success or evading the blame of failure. So take every facet of the paper's
expenses/revenue and figure they ran the numbers dozens of ways for each
minute part of the operation factoring in all their partnerships, ad buys,
etc. They _are_ a news gathering organization so they probably approached the
problem in some depth. Plus they probably had good expense accounts so you
know.. no need to rush it.

------
kondro
Quote: $39,990,000

Result:

    
    
      before_filter { redirect_to :controller => :accounts, :action => :login unless current_user.subscribed? }

~~~
patio11
This is not what was actually implemented, and would have finished the Times,
due to SEO effects alone. (There are numerous other issues, but that's the one
that will crater their revenue _tomorrow_.)

Seriously, while I appreciate the desire of programmers to think that we're
smarter than the average bear, this is like saying StackOverflow is a clone-
it-in-a-weekend site. It betrays a fundamental lack of understanding as to
what is actually going on with the business model.

~~~
kondro
You obviously didn't get the sarcasm. Having said that, $40m is a lot of
money, especially considering it shouldn't have required any extra hardware or
even a complete platform change (with expensive licensing).

Even at $200k/year that's 100 developers for 2 years to implement what is
essentially a subscription-based service. Even if you take into account the
requirement to offer some level of free access for search engines and the like
it still doesn't account for why this project cost this much money.

------
krschultz
So the NYT spent 1% of their revenue on a project to define their entire
future business model? Sounds cheaper than most "lean" startups.

~~~
LostInTheWoods2
If they have that much revenue why do they need a paywall?

~~~
jtheory
Revenue != profit.

------
gooddelta
Strippers, blow, and enterprise software.

~~~
minikomi
are you hiring?

------
jschuur
That's at least $40 million you have to make back in subscriptions until
you're out of the red.

~~~
egor83
From NYT page [1], the most expensive option:

"All Digital Access: $8.75 per week (billed every 4 weeks at $35.00)"

40e6 / (35*12) ~ 95000 yearly subscriptions (but 35$/month is revenue, not
profit)

On the other hand, their circulation is:

876,638 daily

1,352,358 Sunday [2]

_________________________________________________

[1]:
[http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/account/purchases/subscr...](http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/account/purchases/subscriptions-
and-purchases.html#purchasesq01)

[2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times>

------
Seth_Kriticos
There was an elaborate article about this on TechDirt a few days back:

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110317/10393913530/it-
too...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110317/10393913530/it-took-ny-
times-14-months-40-million-dollars-to-build-worlds-stupidest-paywall.shtml)

------
iantimothy
It seems like everyone thought the goal was "How do we charge for content"
instead of "How do we provide value that people are willing to pay for
content".

~~~
Choire
You're making an assumption the paper does not believe it does that already.
But the paper does believe it provides value. News-gathering is, after all,
its business model, and a proven one financially. As a model, providing things
that people want to read and see is a very good one.

------
scott_s
I'm skeptical that the number is actually $40 million, but no one has pointed
out the NY Times is not implementing a simple no-pay, no-content paywall.
That's a known quantity. What they're implementing is a semi-porous wall that
allows people to read 20 articles a month without paying, and I assume allows
web-crawlers to index the content. They're trying to toe the line between
something that lets the world get to their content, but still gets them
revenue. I am unaware of a similar system, nor have I ever tried to design
one.

------
bsiemon
I believe they might have used the same stuff the Washington Post used[1]. The
post quoted a lower ( 7 million ) but still unreal figure in another paywall
related article [2].

[1]
[http://www.eidosmedia.com/EN/Page/Uuid/83c5a8b2-ae9f-11de-9d...](http://www.eidosmedia.com/EN/Page/Uuid/83c5a8b2-ae9f-11de-9d72-8e8f18867204/Web_CMS.xml)

[2] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/behind-the-posts-
rede...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/behind-the-posts-redesigned-
web-site/2011/03/25/AFC3GXYB_story.html)

------
nextparadigms
With expenses like these, it's no wonder the old print media can't survive on
revenue from online advertising and such. They're just too used to the old way
of spending money and having huge costs tied to the delivery of news.

------
supercanuck
Would it help to know that the NYT runs SAP?

------
rohnjaymiller
I was SVP Product + Technology for Knight Ridder when we built our
e-publishing platform for 32 daily newspapers. The total, including internal
hours + resources + vendors was $16 million. That included 3-Tier
architecture, custom CMS and content migration of all 32 newspapers and 32
city sites.

Where did this $40 million price tag come from? It sounds apocryphal...

------
dutchrapley
The flaw is that they've spent way too much time trying to figure out how to
possibly squeeze the most revenue, before launching the digital subscription
pay wall. The New York Times prematurely optimized profits.

Software development doesn't start with the last line of code written, it
starts with the first user. They should have look to optimize as they go. The
problem with the online subscription for newspapers is that there is no
standard baseline to base price off of.

Yet, they won't fall short. It's relative. They dropped $40 million on the pay
wall. They don't have to pay to create content, per se, it's already there (or
will be there as it is written). At the cheapest subscription ($15/mo.), it
would take 2.67 million subscribers to pay it off in one month. That's very
liberal. Or a 1/2 million subscribers over 6 months to pay it off. In the end,
they will very quickly the $40 million spent.

------
Tpsoc
I used to work for work for a decent size newspaper company in a large metro
area and they spent over 6 months to come up with a redesign for a home page
that involved at least 4 or 5 different execs or managers in constant
meetings, talks with an outside design agency about once a week. Oh, the 6
months only involved coming up with the mock ups not actual dev. That was a
while another story with how much time was wasted on that.

So i imagine in a larger company, you would have more execs having constant
meetings over a paywall, studies with how much profit they can make with
pretty graphs to show how the stock price will jump because of the increase in
earnings.

------
davegan
Yes, and Facebook was built by a few nerds in a house in San Francisco.

And yet they've now spent hundreds of millions. Proving a concept is cheap,
but taking into account all the threads that are involved in building out a
large scale application is expensive.

My guess is that the $40m quoted for just the paywall is also inaccurate. They
probably looked at this as an opportunity to update their platform to be more
flexible to take advantage of further business needs for the next decade.

Whether it's a good investment is debatable. But as someone who works in the
technology and media sector, I appreciate them taking the plunge.

------
cyrus_
Worth noting that the NYT already had a registration wall for articles. It
seems that all they needed to do was add a couple of database columns and a
bit of simple logic to make sure the user had paid after 20 articles were
served. Only slightly more complicated would be bypassing the wall for
referrers that they had whitelisted (e.g. Facebook shared links) and the
Google bots.

No, it can't have been technical costs. I'm sure the money went into expensive
consultants who made $20,000 powerpoints about what this would do to revenue
and what the future of publishing is.

------
MebZor
>>There are plenty of free (paper) newspapers that are funded by advertising
revenue. I don't see any reason in principle why it couldn't work for the
online newspapers, who have lower overheads.

(a) IMHO free news is generally crap (b) you'll need some facts to support the
"low overhead/online advertising" argument. Empirical evidence suggests that
is not the case. There are too many advertising destinations for online ads
where there are (or were) relatively few destinations for print ads.

------
timodonnell
I've been getting most of my news from the Times for the past few years, but
I'm not sure I'll subscribe now. I'd have to at least consider other pay
newspapers like WSJ first. Or maybe I'll try to switch to Huffington post.

What other online news sources (free or pay) do you guys think I should
consider as Times alternatives?

------
nazgulnarsil
the traditional news agencies make more sense when viewed as a branch of the
civil service. especially NYT.

------
dr_
Print isn't dying - it's killing itself.

------
sixtofour
Q: How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall?

A: They had $40 million (+) available.

Money abhors a wallet.

------
kprobst
I guess it's possible I might be missing something here, but I can't for the
life of me understand how this is so complicated and expensive. Is there a
technical explanation somewhere? Are they adapting a non-adaptable proprietary
CMS or something like that?

------
orijing
Does this include the cost of assessing various options, or how to design the
pay wall? I'm sure that involved lots of meetings and manager man-hours. But
40m is ridiculous even given those managerial/administrative costs.

------
rmason
They spent $40 million to knee cap themselves! You and I know that in less
than six months the paywall will come down.

They have built a pay wall that can be defeated with three lines of javascipt.
This is so sad on many levels.

~~~
rjkuyvenhoven
I bypass the pay wall on my browser simply by going to the url address bar,
removing the “&gwh=[long-alphanumeric-code]” at the end of the address and
hitting enter

------
tokipin
perhaps upkeep and renovation for _n_ years is included

------
mncolinlee
In my perfect world, they'd spend that money producing high-quality
investigative journalism that makes people WANT to pay for it and lower the
paywall.

------
ctide
Maybe Color raised 41m so they could build a paywall.

------
andjones
thank you for quoting a source (bloomberg). I'd like to see more
journalism/rants that quote some source for reference.

------
mkramlich
I had the exact same reaction. I think it's a classic case of there being no
upper bound on how much time or money can be consumed by a large organization
trying to achieve some effect. They have amazingly labyrinthine and absurdly
bloated ways of doing whatever they want. Like that saying that work expands
to fill the time allotted for it. A given task generally can not be performed
any faster than some specific lower bound. But there's no upper bound, and all
you have to do is add more people, opinions, meetings, committees, processes,
rules, laws, approvals, reversals, fights, dead ends, legacy architecture
appeasement, technical debt, alternative explorations, dead time, vacations,
etc. and you can blow up the time/dollar cost to whatever level you want.

Related note: I bet if some news organization used an off-the-shelf CMS like
WordPress or Drupal, they could add a "paywall" to their site in less than a
week, using mostly the services of a single engineer, and perhaps a designer.
Let's call that a total project cost in the $400 to $4000 range.

ps. If any news organization decision-maker is reading this, I do indie
contracting and would gladly add a paywall to your site for a mere... _(pinkie
in mouth) one million dollars!_

------
nhebb
That's almost as much as Thomas Friedman's travel budget for the year.
Seriously, though, the New York Times is on one end of the left <-> right
media polarization spectrum (w/ Fox on the other end). You'd think the easier
path to increased revenues would be adding content that appeals to the other
half.

~~~
alnayyir
> Seriously, though, the New York Times is on one end of the left <-> right
> media polarization spectrum (w/ Fox on the other end).

Comically untrue from the perspective of someone disconnected from that
spectrum.

~~~
nhebb
What's comical about it?

~~~
alnayyir
It's a canard. Most should know better.

~~~
nhebb
It's not canard. I'm talking about this from a business standpoint, not a
political one. Regardless of whether you think that the NYT is liberal or FNC
is conservative, most conservatives think the NYT is left-leaning and most
liberals think Fox is right-leaning. So if a business is appealing to only
part of the potential market, it seems the obvious thing to do would be to
broaden your appeal.

~~~
pkteison
No, the obvious thing to do is to open a second business with the opposite
appeal.

~~~
s1rech
I think politics is too much of a us against them mentality to be successful
doing that. They'd probably get bashed from both sides if they tried that.

------
by
That is trivial compared to the $10,000 million the Harvard endowment fund
lost.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...](http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a99iobGRQye8)
[http://www.nacubo.org/Documents/research/2009_NCSE_Public_Ta...](http://www.nacubo.org/Documents/research/2009_NCSE_Public_Tables_Endowment_Market_Values.pdf)

~~~
nl
They "lost" $10B as a result of their investment strategy when the global
financial crisis hit. They are far from the only people to lose money then. In
any case that value was unrealized assets, so it's not like they actually had
$36B in cash - as I hope you realize if they ever had to liquidate their
assets quickly they'd get less than that - especially given they it
liquidating that much would probably move the market.

They didn't _spend_ the money wastefully, which is what the NYT seems to have
done.

Your trite comparison is so far from useful it's not even wrong.

~~~
by
"In any case that value was unrealized assets, so it's not like they actually
had $36B in cash"

I could equally say that if they liquidated that $26B quickly they would get
less than that. I would hope the $36B and $26B were fair estimations of the
asset value at the time.

~~~
nl
Yes, exactly. Both are fair, market valuations, but (as in any case when you
have illiquid assets) a valuation and what you get if you were to liquidate
(quickly) are very different things. _Cash is King_ for a good reason!

