I wonder how profitable this type of 'short opinion piece' journalism is. How much does a journalist get paid to write something like this?
Running some content websites myself which make like $0.001 per visitor, I am surprised this can be sustainable.
>In keeping with a fast growing technology company, all free cash flow is plowed back into R&D to drive down the costs and bring the follow on products to market as fast as possible. When someone buys the Tesla Roadster sports car, they are actually helping pay for development of the low cost family car.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j...
I'm not going to get into the exact economics, but Ars writers write about a piece a day, and the average piece gets tens of thousands of visitors. Revenue per article (for most mainstream news site, not just Ars) is significantly better than $0.001 per visitor. High-end advertisers are willing to pay a premium to put their ads next to high-quality content and to know the demographics of the people seeing their ads. None of us is getting rich doing this though!
We're also fortunate to have a significant base of paying subscribers, which makes it easier for us to write in-depth pieces that might not generate enough revenue from ads alone.
First of all, let me say that I liked the article. I am the one who posted it to HN after all.
Maybe "short" was not the perfect word to express what I mean. I mean that the message/idea is kind of short. It's almost like a showerthought "See this chart? It looks like they are in the red all the time. But think of it this way: They build success after success. They could have been profitable ever since Model S. But they keep investing in bigger projects instead.".
Interesting, that the revenue is significantly higher then $0.001 per visitor. Because it looks like the main ad spots are filled with Google Ads. Which I run too. Do advertisers really target specific sites manually via Google Ads? I would have thought they do that algorithmically based on demographic factors.
I do not know very much about the specifics of Ars's ad sales strategy. I would guess Google pays more to established sites. Also, if you're seeing a Google ad that might be because they didn't have a higher-paying direct-sale competitor for that particular impression.
They absolutely did. Tesla was a bet on production. They bet the company over the past few months.
They weren’t an Amazon “if we dial it back a bit we can be profitable” case. They were a “if we don’t make enough cars we may not pay our debts” case. They made enough cars. That doesn’t mean the concerns ex ante were unmerited.