The NYT has existed for a sufficiently long enough time that they could not possibly have been losing money. Now, their revenue from subscriptions is apparently going up after than their revenue from advertisements is falling. Shouldn't that indicate that they are still cash flow positive? Alternatively, are you saying their costs are going up dramatically to compensate for this increase in revenue, and that, in fact, they are now losing money and will soon die?
So, to verify: you believe that the NYT has managed to go over 150 years in the red? Maybe propped up by an insanely large funding round, with an extremely low burn rate? austenallred's contention is that somehow the NYT costs more to produce than people are willing to pay, and that this is an endemic problem with journalism, not just some recent problem with a website (and, as I point out, it can't be, as with the website NYT's subscription revenue is up in over-compensation to the amount their advertising revenue is down).
No one is contending that the NYT has never generated a profit. It has been very, very successful on the past, however with the advent of the Internet came a lot of cheap and free content, making the average consumer less willing to pay for content, while simultaneously creating cheaper, more targeted avenues for advertising.
Nearly every newspaper in the United States sees that by switching to free, digital content, they only earn a small fraction of the revenue that they did from the more heavily based subscription model. The response to this was to erect "paywalls," or requiring a subscription at some point online, in order to recoup done of the lost revenue.
What we are finding (and the NYT is the 600-pound gorilla in journalism and arguably the most important case study) is that some people are willing to pay for access to digital content.
The problem, however, is that the cost to produce this digital content is currently still greater than the revenue it brings in. Yes, the New York Times loses money every year - it's publicly traded and its profit and loss statements are publicly available, so there's no assumptions being made; they are losing money. A lot of it. They're publicly traded and have a lot of retained earnings, so they can afford to do this for a while, but they are losing money every year nonetheless.
Can you justify this position? I ask because it contradicts the article, which is stating that all subscription revenue, being buffeted by the web subscriptions that now make up 12% of this, are making up for falling advertising revenue.
Hence why I specifically asked:
"""Alternatively, are you saying their costs are going up dramatically to compensate for this increase in revenue, and that, in fact, they are now losing money and will soon die?"""
Is your claim that the costs this content digital (developers, designers, etc.) are drastically higher than making physical papers(which are sufficiently expensive that papers normally take a loss on sales)?
One other possible option (although from the same "alternatively"): are you saying that the digital content is much more expansive, not by a little (the online blogs and image rolls) than the paper content that their costs went up?
I specifically left the outs regarding the costs increasing, and no one is arguing that: I got back a fairly useless "what?" followed by your argument that doesn't seem to be informed by the scant numbers in the article. :(
(edit:)
Obviously, though, you aren't going to do that, because you didn't even use the numbers from this article, so I went and pulled New York Time Company's SEC filings and some historical expense reports.
It is clear from their filings that 1) advertising revenues are decreasing, but not by much, 2) as the article states, circulation revenues are increasing enough to compensate, and 3) their costs have not increased in the last 4 years.
Why, then, do you make this assertion that their product costs more to make than to sell? Again: either 1) that means their income is down (it isn't, per the article), 2) they were never profitable in the first place (not true, by common sense), or 3) their costs are up.
#3 is the only plausible option, and neither the person I responded to not the responses to me are justifying that position, and it really doesn't seem justifiable from the data they release on their financials.
