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The New York Times Has Lessons For Others Making the Slow Transition To Digital
mattydread23 writes "You may not think your business has much in common with the New York Times, but the newspaper is a perfect example of how to maintain investment in a large but declining legacy business while simultaneously investing in new areas that will drive future growth. Surprisingly, 10% of the paper's revenue now comes from digital subscriptions and other all-digital products (not including advertising)."
When the NYT charges so much for digital subscriptions (esp. tablet), it's not surprising 10% of their revenue is digital.
"digital subscriptions and other"...so DS's are a single digit percentage.
Most papers are local. News about a small city or region. New York Times is not only national, it's international, if you ignore all the NY pretentiousness. The NYT can make it on the internet with this model, but most papers cannot. For any local paper, there just aren't enough subscribers to make it a viable business model. Even papers from larger cities like Chicago, LA, Houston, etc. are having issues.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
The NY Times overlooks the fundamentals of digital news: Their website is still a news- paper website, instead of a news website. It's print newspaper articles copied to the web, rather than news on the web platform.
One problem is their inability to communicate using modern tools (i.e., anything but text). Just about any blogger can communicate by inserting images, audio, or video inline in a post, while the NY Times, with all its resources, seems to be text with an image or other multimedia occasionally stapled onto the top of the page or on a separate page.
Sometimes text is the appropriate tool; sometimes an image, audio, or video is. For example, if someone says something important (or dubious or otherwise extraordinary), rather than transcribe it to text, show a video clip of them saying it (i.e., Here is Hilary Clinton's response: ) Then the readers can judge the body language, intonation, etc. for themselves. Another example is their arts reviews, where they describe key visual aspects of a painting, film, or performance -- but in text. Why not use clips or images, inline, as needed? This is the web in 2013, not paper in 1950.
The clear answer seems to be the universal recipe for obsolescence: That's the way they've always done it. If the NY Times can't compete with anyone with a Wordpress blog, they are way behind the curve.
Is it a surprise the NYT has managed to get even 10% of revenue from online sources? Or that it is so small a figure after years of trying?
I'm surprised that a company that apparently gets 90% of its revenue from non-digital sources is held up as an example of how to get money from digital sources.
NYT Digital (the website) was a separate but wholly-owned company from 1996 until around 2007, merging with the newspaper as the new building opened. Pageviews in the mid 2000s were half a billion per month, with approximately half that going to the homepage alone.
IIRC, annual revenues for website advertising were $150 million in the late 2000s, damned good for a newspaper site. This was before NYT jumped onto the mobile and paid-digital-subscription bandwagons, which accounts for the $37 million revs. Adverts are still king, even on the website, and that combined with the homepage being half the pageviews is why you see the most expensive placements there.
While the rest of the newspaper biz has been slow to adopt, NYTD were actively educating the old-school news staff about FB, Twitter, RSS and other common or up-and-coming technologies. They have programmers assigned to the news floor, collaborating with reporters, to build topical databases, perform big data analyses, produce dynamic reporting and graphics and so forth. NYT are doing about as well as can be expected -they're a news organization, yes, but they've converted themselves into a technology firm from the inside-out.
NYT offers developers REST APIs for fetching newsfeeds and the aforementioned databases. Semantic Web is an area of research, and they're on a level with Thomson-Reuters, and to a limited extent Bloomberg. NYT's R&D department (originally attached to the newspaper, not NYTD) produces tools for latent semantic analysis of news, comments, etc.
When Twitter hit its initial growth spurt there were many predictions it would eat the newspaper business. It hasn't, in fact the news business relies on Twitter for distributing headlines and links. 140 characters and photo links hasn't eliminated the need for in-depth writing, analysis and professional photography.
Sure, the transition to an all-digital revenue model is their Achilles Heel. Most of the rev comes from the newspaper, and the demographic average is male, 40s and makes > $70K per year. Getting the younger generations to pay for news is the challenge.
I'm a former NYTDer. I still admire what they've done to adapt. I don't know how they'll survive the next decade, honestly. It'll take a revolution in paid subscriptions to get the younger crowd as part of the paid demographic. HuffPo was being eyed as the primary competition, for awhile, as an advert-only web operation.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
1/3 Subscriptions, 1/3 Advertising, 1/3 Classifieds. That was the recipe for newspaper income in the 1970s and 80s. They retrenched initially and lost the Classifieds to Ebay and Craigslist. Now they have 2 which deny each other, if they give free access they gain Advertising, but lose subscriptions, if they charge for Subscription, they may lose Advertising.
The newspapers OWNED classifieds. They totally OWNED it. They blew it to ebay and Craigslist. So the NYTimes is a great example of playing catch-up ball.
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