Why can't they just "copy stories and pictures from the newspaper"? If anyone in the media business would be able to generate bulk traffic (read: advertising $$) from sheer content without any particular bells and whistles, it would be the website that simply mirrors the staggering amount of content from the NYT.
Ultimately, because there is not enough money to be made in online banner style advertising. The typical newspaper is over 50% advertising, inches upon inches of it, all at a lovely 200 dpi. A typical web page supports about 20% advertising, at much lower resolutions. Also, newspaper can't charge as much for each person who views one of their online ads, primarily because they have very effective competition from search engine advertising, which is actually very highly effective.
Take a look at newspaper publisher's 10K and 10Q filings. Online readership is high and growing, but online advertising revenue sucks. Borrell Associates has crunched the number here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010038. Typical print subscriber yields $500-$900 in ad revenue annually. Typical unique web site visitor yields $5-$10 per year. So as readership moves online, revenue is dropping by two orders of magnitude. This would be a bit more palatable if costs of running an online newspaper were also two orders of magnitude less than the cost of running a print paper. But they aren't. Writing stories is pretty much fixed. We aren't getting much faster at producing 10 inches on the city council on deadline. According to http://www.inlandpress.org/Main.asp?SectionID=61&SubSectionID=244&ArticleID=1031, typical newsroom costs at a paper are around 12-13% of overall revenue. But the best performing newspaper in the US only earns 8.4% of their revenue from online advertising.
The only ad supported internet sites that are making any money are the ones that avoid content creation costs. Look at Flickr, MySpace or YouTube. Billions of photos and videos, all surrounded by advertising. What were their content creation costs? Zero.
This is why newspapers are screwed. Producing content is a sucker's bet. Controlling distribution (online, read: traffic) is where the money is made. Newspapers used to control news distribution because printing presses were expensive. Online, they aren't. NYT is finding itself in the same position that most actors, musicians, book authors, artists, bloggers and, ironically enough, their own journalists have always been in: no bargaining power, lots of competition and low wages.
I work for a Very Large Online Publisher, and yeah, this is pretty much the key. There are few reasons for an ad or traffic counter to slow a properly designed page. In fact, displaying pages that render regardless of ads can turn out to be mission critical. A year ago, a story on one of our sites got Drudged, Slashdotted, Boing-Boinged, Dugg, etc. all at once. This is not totally unusual for us, and should not have been a problem for us to handle. However, the servers really started to slow down, and while the sites never went down completely, surfing our content got pretty painful. Culprit turned out to be an interesting interaction between users, ad servers, and our site. We had a slow loading ad that was appearing on most of our page. Because the HTML wasn't well designed, the page content wouldn't load until the ad appeared. Users presumably have figured this out, and would click re-load on their browser over and over again until the ad server finally responded to one of their requests. Result: actual number of requests to our servers grew by an order of magnitude over what we'd normally expect for a given number of actual users. We wrote up a presentation entitled "Slow ads + bad HTML = Company Left $XXX,XXX On the Table" and got the funding to re-code all our templates.
Slashdot Mirror
Ultimately, because there is not enough money to be made in online banner style advertising. The typical newspaper is over 50% advertising, inches upon inches of it, all at a lovely 200 dpi. A typical web page supports about 20% advertising, at much lower resolutions. Also, newspaper can't charge as much for each person who views one of their online ads, primarily because they have very effective competition from search engine advertising, which is actually very highly effective.
Take a look at newspaper publisher's 10K and 10Q filings. Online readership is high and growing, but online advertising revenue sucks. Borrell Associates has crunched the number here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010038. Typical print subscriber yields $500-$900 in ad revenue annually. Typical unique web site visitor yields $5-$10 per year. So as readership moves online, revenue is dropping by two orders of magnitude. This would be a bit more palatable if costs of running an online newspaper were also two orders of magnitude less than the cost of running a print paper. But they aren't. Writing stories is pretty much fixed. We aren't getting much faster at producing 10 inches on the city council on deadline. According to http://www.inlandpress.org/Main.asp?SectionID=61&SubSectionID=244&ArticleID=1031, typical newsroom costs at a paper are around 12-13% of overall revenue. But the best performing newspaper in the US only earns 8.4% of their revenue from online advertising.
The only ad supported internet sites that are making any money are the ones that avoid content creation costs. Look at Flickr, MySpace or YouTube. Billions of photos and videos, all surrounded by advertising. What were their content creation costs? Zero.
This is why newspapers are screwed. Producing content is a sucker's bet. Controlling distribution (online, read: traffic) is where the money is made. Newspapers used to control news distribution because printing presses were expensive. Online, they aren't. NYT is finding itself in the same position that most actors, musicians, book authors, artists, bloggers and, ironically enough, their own journalists have always been in: no bargaining power, lots of competition and low wages.
I work for a Very Large Online Publisher, and yeah, this is pretty much the key. There are few reasons for an ad or traffic counter to slow a properly designed page. In fact, displaying pages that render regardless of ads can turn out to be mission critical. A year ago, a story on one of our sites got Drudged, Slashdotted, Boing-Boinged, Dugg, etc. all at once. This is not totally unusual for us, and should not have been a problem for us to handle. However, the servers really started to slow down, and while the sites never went down completely, surfing our content got pretty painful. Culprit turned out to be an interesting interaction between users, ad servers, and our site. We had a slow loading ad that was appearing on most of our page. Because the HTML wasn't well designed, the page content wouldn't load until the ad appeared. Users presumably have figured this out, and would click re-load on their browser over and over again until the ad server finally responded to one of their requests. Result: actual number of requests to our servers grew by an order of magnitude over what we'd normally expect for a given number of actual users. We wrote up a presentation entitled "Slow ads + bad HTML = Company Left $XXX,XXX On the Table" and got the funding to re-code all our templates.