Hacker News Reader

Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR NY times now gets (slightly) more revenue from paying subscribers than advertisers, but they still lost $88 million last quarter.

I think it's an interesting milestone, and wonder how many other papers have now had that happen (and how many were already doing that).

EDIT: mention the loss

View on HN

An interesting sidebar (not mentioned in the NYMag piece) is that the $88 million loss is due to a write down of $194.7 for About.com [1]. About.com reportedly took a heavy traffic hit from the Google Panda/Penguin update.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/business/media/the-new-yor...

I'd add the fact that they had a quarterly net loss of $88.1 million to you TL;DR.

The real headline is that the NYT is supported by neither, but gets more money from subscribers than advertisers. It will be interesting to see if they can get enough subscribers to become profitable again.

It doesn't matter.

The NYTimes is the official mouthpiece for the US government, no matter who is in the White House. They will never be allowed to fail. (until some other mouthpiece for the White House emerges)

Before you 'junk' me, why not read the words the editor of the NYTimes, Bill Keller, spoke 2 years ago:

http://ggdrafts.blogspot.com.br/2012/07/bill-keller-and-us-g...

That blogpost in no way supports your statement. In fact, quite the opposite.

If you think retaining some information at the behest of a government or source makes you a corrupt broker of information... Then there's never been a pure news agent ever.

Barack Obama does not approve this message!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/us/politics/latest-word-on...

I guess "now supported by reader subscriptions" is a glass-half-full way of saying advertising revenue is down.

Exactly the way I read this headline.

Not that I have a problem with this exactly, whenever ad dollars start falling many large scale web properties have historically reacted in one of two ways: (1) providing a premium based subscription service that forces quality content or users will drop (the opposite of this being a free, impression driven, quality agnostic model by splitting up articles over multiple pages) or (2) increasing ad costs which in turn results in more scrutiny in what is being fed through the ad engine.

These aren't the gold standards, please keep that in mind; it's purely anecdotal. I threw this observation over at a friend who is a professional affiliate marketer and has his own four man firm, he concurs. When ad dollars drop, media companies fight for whatever revenue normalcy they can get by improving quality in the two areas users have the biggest impact: interacting with your media and interacting with the ads supporting said media.

I'm optimistic here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com