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NYTimes.com Reports 100k Subscribers
An anonymous reader writes "Despite Slashdot (and much of the internet) ridiculing the New York Time for its archaic and overpriced paywall, the newspaper has reported an excess of one hundred thousand subscribers so far. Even as loopholes are offered, the New York Times has some support which they will need as print revenues dwindle (falling a staggering 57.6 percent during the year's first quarter)." Whether 100 thousand is a high number or a low one I guess depends on the NYT's business plan. Have they lost advertising revenue, and if so, how much? Have they turned many readers to alternative news sources?
Are these pure subscriptions, paying full price? Or are these subscriptions that come with something else or are heavily discounted? Most times, companies like this seem to include people who have print subscriptions that have accessed the website, essentially for free, or other methods of obtaining a subscription as a "subscriber." This is blatantly misleading when counting figures of how many people are actually willing to PAY in excess of what they have already paid (if anything) to obtain a subscription.
If it's a pure subscriber number, as in, 100k people have plunked down the full price of the subscription, I'd say that fairly decent. If it's including other "subscribers" who didn't have to pay or paid a fraction of the cost, I'd say they are dishonest and are trying to bolster their numbers to look good.
Does anyone know what the NYT print readership averages? At first glance 100,000 sounds like a lot, but for a world class newspaper, it seems like a pittance.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Let's see, 100,000 subscribers, all subscribing at $3.75 a week (the cheapest plan), and costing 40 million to develop...
At the current rate, they'll have made their money back in just about 2 years. Maybe the absurdly high cost was worth it after all.
Note: The 100k figure *does* include those who subscribed with a promotion, so the actual figure could be significantly less. Or more, if many users are paying for the more expensive levels of service.
Ever since NYT put up the pay wall, I switched to Slashdot for my news source.
You get what you pay for.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I'd like to know how many of these are voluntary subscriptions. My first year in college, they made us subscribe to the NYT, despite the fact that there were at least five major cities with well-known papers (at least one, PIttsburgh, having two) nearer to the school than New York. Now, this was a small, private school, but if even one large state school did the same, they could easily make up the lion's share of the subscribers (SUNY alone could nearly quadruple the 100K figure).
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
Assuming this is an accurate count of online subscriptions (and not an artificially inflated count since all paper subscriptions are also online subscriptions), the next question is to wonder how many of those are inherited from their e-reader circulation ... As of April 2010, the New York Times had 90,934 e-reader subscriptions (which was about twice the number from the previous year). If they doubled from 2009 to 2010 and then only attracted an extra 10% by 2011, I wouldn't call that much of a success.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Revenue falling 57.6 percent generally means the end of a business. Profit, (revenue - expenses) falling 57.6 percent is not a big deal in a business which has often been in the black as of late.
I've had a nytimes.com login pretty much since they started requiring registration to view stories -- late 90s some time? Right after the paywall was announced, I got an email thanking me for being a long-time account holder and offering me a free year's subscription. I took their offer, of course. How many of those 100,000 subscribers are actually paying?
I'm about to hit the wall as an unregistered user, in that a pop-up appeared yesterday counting down the articles I have coming before I'm cut-off, but a registered nic of mine, under which I skim incessantly, has had nary a warning. I'm not sure if the roll out is staged and I'll hit that wall with that account too, but so far it's way over any so-called 20 story limit with no end in sight, so they haven't completely lost me as a reader. Yet.
- js.
The NY Times used to have the highest newspaper circulation in the world.
Online is a hundred times more efficient than newsprint.
That 100K should be closer to 10M, after all they spent on it.
Printing the news is dead. Paying for the news is dead. Expecting people to consider your news site a one-stop shop or social hub is dead.
The NY Times should get with the rest of the world and differentiate its brand based on the quality, depth, and breadth of its reporting. Live and die by the by-line and the click-through from the headline aggregator. Because you're not going to find loyalty or exclusivity any more.
Their average weekly print circulation is around 877,000. The 100K figure doesn't include free access with the print version or the iPhone/iPad applications. What's not entirely clear is if the 100K includes the Kindle and Nook ereaders. Because they all of a sudden switch to percentages, stating that ereader versions are up 4.5%. They were so clear everywhere else but all of a sudden get ambiguous.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The club I frequent has 3-4 copies of the NYT and other national papers each morning. I read them there for free after done skiing or simply take them home after which I shred and compost. In the end, I pay nothing for the paper and it doesn't fill landfills. Community vs. private is the gist here, some should consider this the basis of 'news' and follow the model right to salvation.
NYT offered me a free one year subscription ( "sponsored by Lincoln") which I accepted. If they hadn't I would either have stopped reading their articles or used one of the workarounds.
For argument's sake, Facebook has 500 million active users and the NY Times, supposedly the grand-daddy of all (American) newspapers has: 100k? Hahahahahahahahaha.....
Facebook is free. I'm sure there are more than 100k people going to the free NYT site.
I don't care how many times the Facebook marketing team wants to repeat it, Facebook does not have 500m active users.
your math assumed that NYT paywall and web content delivery infrastructure requires no further updates/maintenance/bug fixes, which is flawed in the world of frequent over-the-wire firmware updates (YES Sony, I am talking about YOU and YOUR PS3, BluRay, etc.)
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
... and how many there are.
You see, shortly before they went to the paid subscription model, I was awarded, for reasons unclear to me, a free subscription for a year. When it runs out, I doubt I shall pay to renew it.
Oh, the @$$holes who wanted to sound smart would read an article or two a day and constantly refer to it, but it's hardly a coincidence they started a recycling program about the same time. Anyone who actually cared about current events would read one of the local papers that covered stuff like, oh, the school we were going to (despite the fact that I'm not nearly as young as I wish I still were, this was also recently enough that every dorm room on campus had an internet connection).
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
How much does a subscription cost? Multiply that by 100,000, and I bet that NYT won't be anywhere near recouping the costs for their $40 million new paywall for decades.
I read the NY Times every day - it's one of my main sources of general news, together with the Washington Post, BBC, and a couple of local newspaper sites.
We need a vigorous, active press to control the excesses of government and to shine light into dark places. I would be seriously worried for the USA if our quality national newspapers disappeared.
I'm happy to contribute my $15 a month, and I'd be willing to go higher if they asked. I just wish more people felt the same way.
the newspaper has reported an excess of one hundred thousand subscribers so far.
Wow, they have 100,000 more subscribers than they want?
If it is the case that print ads are still more profitable than web ads, then subtley encouraging people to get the print edition because it's cheaper increases revenues. Now, whether the the increased costs (printing and distribution of the paper edition) are greater than or less than the increased revenues is another question entirely.
If the link says new york or wall street at all I just assume a paywall and never ever click on it. Who needs them?
My daughter was forced by her college government professor to subscribe to the NYT. Why not the WSJ also? On the office window of one of the professors is the sticker "Change you can believe in". What am I paying for? I suspect the professor will be choking on that phrase in two election cycles. Bye bye Krugman.
(I don't have any moderation points now, sometimes I get 15 sometimes 5?)
You know good journalism is expensive, it costs companies to produce it and sometimes it costs journalists (and photo journalists!) their lives :(
I rely on the NYTimes so heavily for good information and, more importantly ANALYSIS that I actually felt guilty until they put up the paywall. I didn't think they could generate enough revenue just through their ads so I was worried. I'm a subscriber now of course.
Then again maybe the NYTimes to me is a special case. There are very few other sites I would pay for.
They've lost more in web-smart credibility than advertising dollars.
An NYT online subscription is worth twenty dollars per *year* to me, not per month. It is the same story as e-book publishers - It simply doesn't cost as much to publish online as in print, so there is no justification for trying to jack up their margins. Until the NYT recognizes that the public is savvy enough to realize this and lower their fees to something reflecting cost-plus-reasonable margin (say, 20% without subsidizing costs from the print operation) I will continue to ignore the paywall.
They started charging the $15 fee to me today. I used to subscribe to read Krugman and Dowd when they had that thing going but for less money I think. I'll keep going at this rate until it feels like I've paid what they are worth, probably not more than 10 months since a year's subscription to Science costs $150 and that is worth more than the NYT.
I got a free 7 month subscription, courtesy of of a luxury car company. I just have to view and extra ad every time I log in.
Don't want to sound smart in school for sure.