Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

NYTimes.com Reports 100k Subscribers

Posted by timothy on from the what's-the-baseline? dept.

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?

17 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Pure subscriptions? by NitroWolf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Pure subscriptions? by paugq · · Score: 2

      You read my mind.

      Paper subscribers do receive a complimentary all-included digital subscription.

      Now, digital advertising agencies are certainly interested in how many of those 100,000 subscribers are paid and how many came for free with paper. People who received the digital subscription for free are most likely to keep reading on paper (there's a reason why they are paying more for home delivery, after all).

      Business-wise, it doesn't really matter whether subscriptions are pure digital subscriptions or paper subscriptions with a digital subscription for free: it's money coming in. With the digital subscriptions strategy they are cutting the bleed of people who gave up on paper and moved to reading the paper on-line for free.

    2. Re:Pure subscriptions? by nysus · · Score: 5, Informative

      I paid 99 cents last month and just renewed this month for another 99 cents. They aren't charging full price.

      --

      ---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.

    3. Re:Pure subscriptions? by QRDeNameland · · Score: 4, Informative

      Are these pure subscriptions, paying full price? Or are these subscriptions that come with something else or are heavily discounted?

      According to the article (yeah, yeah, I know), the 100,000 figure "does not include print subscribers who receive digital access for free but does include readers who took advantage of a promotional offer."

      --
      Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
    4. Re:Pure subscriptions? by MoonBuggy · · Score: 3, Informative

      In case anyone was wondering: Monday-Friday paper subscription, including full digital access, is $7.40/week, totalling $384.80/year. Full digital access alone is $34.99/month, or $419.88/year. Five paper copies a week, including delivery, apparently come to -$35.08/year, so it looks like they should be paying you at least $0.13 per copy to take them off the news stands.

      There are introductory discounts running ($0.99 for the first four weeks of digital subscription, half price for the first 12 weeks of paper) but I've ignored them on the basis that they're short term. That said, taking advantage of them would actually increase the discrepancy a little, making print+digital an even better option.

      Sure, you can pay less in total to get either the smartphone subscription or the tablet one, and you have to pay a decent amount more if you want the weekend papers too (although not so much if you only want the weekend ones), but that doesn't change the fact that if you want the all-access digital package, they're charging extra for the privilege of not having a hard copy sent out every day.

    5. Re:Pure subscriptions? by MoonBuggy · · Score: 2

      Regarding Spotify, I was referring to the fact that they charge £4.99/month for unlimited access on Windows/Linux/OSX devices (thus covering the recurring cost of the actual licensing, as well as bandwidth and server costs) but £9.99/month for 'Premium', with Android/iOS access, higher bitrates, and offline sync. I'd expect that the offline sync compensates for the increased bandwidth used by the higher bitrate, making the costs there no higher than the lower tier paid package, but maybe I'm wrong. Do the mobile apps forego P2P completely, or do they still take advantage of it for download without contributing to upload? If it's the latter, then the extra load on Spotify's servers should be negligible unless a very significant proportion of their users are on the mobile apps at a given time. Anyhow, I'll concede that it's less clear cut than I may have implied (and certainly less clear cut than the NYT, I agree).

    6. Re:Pure subscriptions? by MoonBuggy · · Score: 3, Informative

      What exactly are you referring to, this one-off cost?

      I may have been unclear, but the remainder of that paragraph: "In this case, it's the fact that smartphone+tablet costs more than just one or the other. Charge a small fee for the app if you must (although honestly I'd be surprised if the dev costs are more than negligible), but don't charge me extra every damn month for something you only needed to pay for once." was referring to the one-off cost of developing the iOS and Android applications to view the content. Obviously collecting the news every day is a recurring cost, and that's what users pay a recurring subscription for; what I object to is that once you've paid $'x' per month for access to the content, they then charge you $'x+y' per month for access to the content on a particular device. I understand paying continually for the content, I'll pay once for the app if I must, but what I object to is being charged continually, over and above the cost of the content, for the use of the mobile app on a given platform.

  2. The real issue as I see it... by roc97007 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...is what they're going to do about all those Union contracts for the print side of the paper. All those jobs are dead as soon as print is dead, and I'm sure this has occurred to the union bosses. It's going to be interesting to see what happens.

    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.
    1. Re:The real issue as I see it... by Nidi62 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      A year ago their daily circulation was 950,000, 1.4 million for Sundays. So, that would be around roughly 10% of their print circulation.(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/business/media/27audit.html) And from the NYT website as well, all print subscribers get free access to their web content. Whether or not that 100,000 includes people who are logging on through their print subscriptions, well, that's up in the air.

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    2. Re:The real issue as I see it... by roc97007 · · Score: 2

      You're right, reporters, editors, and proof readers don't change much.

      > But then you've got "printers, printer overhead, then distributors, distributor overhead, then a delivery mechanism", which is directly related to the number of readers. Similarly, "web hosting (bandwidth, servers, backups, etc.)" costs are also directly related to the number of readers.

      To a certain extent, but that's not really the point. The point is that it takes dramatically fewer people to man a datacenter, than it does to deliver newspapers, for a given number of users. Think about the tons of paper and ink that have to be lugged to printers, the operation of the printers the maintenance of same, every day for every issue. Consider those tons of paper are turned into -- tons of papers, which have to be baled, transported to and loaded into trucks, and then those trucks driven to distribution centers, where they're broken down into smaller trucks and taken to other locations, where they're delivered to news stands or smaller distribution centers where they're doled out to individual carriers. You're talking massive manual labor here. And you're not even considering the creation of those huge rolls of paper and thousands of gallons of ink -- those people will be out of work too. I know, computers in a hosting farm have to be created also, but computers are generally capital investments, not consumables as are paper and ink. In other words, you don't buy a computer and expend it to create one issue, as you do paper and ink. You buy a computer and keep it for a long time.

      Now, consider how many employees are needed to maintain a data center for half a million web users. This is done all the time, methods are well known, and it doesn't take more than a handful of people. Orders of magnitude fewer than all those drivers and handlers and loaders necessary to make a print business work for half a million customers. Moreover, the jobs in a data center will tend to be technical in nature, as opposed to driving a forklift or humping bales, and they will almost certainly be non-union.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
  3. 2009-2010: 100% increase. 2011-2011: 10% increase by Khopesh · · Score: 2

    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.
  4. Are they counting free subscriptions? by Logic+Bomb · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

  5. Compared to print subscriptions by HangingChad · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  6. Re:So by TheEyes · · Score: 2

    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.

  7. Re:100k is pathetic. by Lehk228 · · Score: 2

    paying for news may be dead but it shouldn't be

    when news is free the news you will get will be the news that the people who are paying for the news to be assembled want you to see.

    expect the "news" to look a lot like freerepublic and fox news.

    --
    Snowden and Manning are heroes.
  8. Re:Not such a terrible idea? by Luckyo · · Score: 2

    They are charging everyone either 0.99USD if they don't have a paper subscription, or 0USD if they do.

    It's an introductory rate designed to "ease" people into subscribing. The real test will come when they start charging the prices advertised after introductory rates are over.

  9. Re:Spotty Enforcement by Serious+Callers+Only · · Score: 2

    If the reminders count down to zero and they start trying to block you reading content, simply remove the dynamic bit of the URL and reload the page, or visit the site from something like google news; the paywall is trivially easy to circumvent at the moment (presumably by design), I'll be interested to see how far they go with this and what happens when they try to lock it down and stop offering huge discounts and deals on subscriptions. The NYT is one of the best papers in the english speaking world (quality of writing/editorial staff, and to a lesser extent in reporting), and if they can't make payments work, no-one can.

    My initial feeling was sadness that they have left the internet, but they do have to make a living or why bother running a news site at all, and advertising brings its own compromises. Along with sites like Facebook there is now a trend for a balkanised internet which is sadly reminiscent of all the walled gardens like eworld that we saw in the 90s.