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How is The New York Times Really Doing? (om.co)
Wired magazine did a profile on The New York Times in its this month's issue. Talking about the paper's transition from print to more digital-focus than ever, author Gabriel Snyder wrote, "It's to transform the Times' digital subscriptions into the main engine of a billion-dollar business, one that could pay to put reporters on the ground in 174 countries even if (OK, when) the printing presses stop forever." Veteran journalist Om Malik analyzes the numbers: -> The company reported revenue of nearly $1.6 billion in 2016 -- remarkably consistent with prior years.
-> Print advertising revenue dipped by $70 million year-over-year to $327 million in 2016.
-> Digital advertising revenue, while a meaningful portion of the Times' revenue, did not grow enough to offset vanishing print ad dollars.
-> Total digital ad revenue in 2016 was $206 million, up only 6% from the prior year.
-> The key revenue driver for the New York Times has been its digital subscription business, which added more than half a million paid subscribers in 2016. Thanks in part to interest around the presidential election, the newspaper added 276,000 new digital subscribers in Q4, the single largest quarterly increase since 2011 (the year the pay model was launched).
The Times' digital success is hinged upon two major drivers: affiliate revenues from services like the Wirecutter and digital subscriptions. Advertising might be a good short term bandaid, but the company needs to focus on how to evolve away from it even more aggressively. The Times needs to simplify their sign-up experience and make it easier for people to pay for the subscriptions. As of now, it is like the sound you hear when scratching your nails on a piece of glass.
-> Print advertising revenue dipped by $70 million year-over-year to $327 million in 2016.
-> Digital advertising revenue, while a meaningful portion of the Times' revenue, did not grow enough to offset vanishing print ad dollars.
-> Total digital ad revenue in 2016 was $206 million, up only 6% from the prior year.
-> The key revenue driver for the New York Times has been its digital subscription business, which added more than half a million paid subscribers in 2016. Thanks in part to interest around the presidential election, the newspaper added 276,000 new digital subscribers in Q4, the single largest quarterly increase since 2011 (the year the pay model was launched).
The Times' digital success is hinged upon two major drivers: affiliate revenues from services like the Wirecutter and digital subscriptions. Advertising might be a good short term bandaid, but the company needs to focus on how to evolve away from it even more aggressively. The Times needs to simplify their sign-up experience and make it easier for people to pay for the subscriptions. As of now, it is like the sound you hear when scratching your nails on a piece of glass.
Really, I have to give them credit where credit is due: by repeatedly pointing out errors (however trivial) out of the tens of thousands of news stories that are published every day, they've managed to get their supporters to the point where they'll trust a new story on www.siteiveneverheardofbefore.com/newishstuff/hillaryclintonpedophilering.html more than they will an actual newspaper. It's a real masterstroke in terms of controlling the narrative. "Anything negative you hear about me, it's fake, because there exist cases where newspapers have made errors, and we've selectively presented you only with those cases to create a narrative for you that newspapers are packed full of fakery." Not just newspapers - fact checkers, peer-reviewed articles, even official government statistics - all fake, because they've been presented with every case people can get their hands of of error, without the balancing context of the 10000x more that wasn't in error.
In the words of XKCD: "Dear God, I would like to file a bug report". ;)
It's the same thing that contributed to the Challenger explosion. They had a nice clean graph in front of them that plotted O-ring failures vs. temperature. There was no clear trend visible on the graph. The problem was that they omitted the successes, the cases where there were no O-ring failures. Here's what it looked like with that added in. All of the sudden there's a very clear trend of failure increasing at low temperatures - in fact, every low temperature launch had had O-ring failures, while very few high-temperature launches had. By being selective in what data you present (accidentally in that case, on purpose in the present case), you can get people to believe precisely the opposite of what is true.
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
Elections are never a sure thing. Even fivethirtyeight was weighted towards Clinton, but everything has an error margin, and any prediction of something as large and complex as hundreds of millions of voters in what amounts to fifty separate elections, each with its own dynamics, is inevitably going to have a significant margin of error. For chrissakes, even many Republicans expected, and probably hoped Trump would lose (as is evidenced by the chaos now surrounding repealing and replacing Obamacare, as it turns out no Republican in Congress, save perhaps for Rand Paul, ever actually believed they would ever be in a position to replace Obamacare).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.