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Comment by gmjoe | Hacker News Reader

Some numbers for perspective [1]:

Digital-only subscription revenue in 2017: $340 million

Digital advertising revenue in 2017: $238 million

Obviously some digital advertising is shown to print subscribers logging in too... but if we ignore that for simplicity, without ads your NYT digital subscription would be 70% more expensive.

At $195/yr. for digital-only, it's already my most expensive subscription by a significant amount. If it were 70% more, or $331.50/yr, I imagine subscriptions would drop by a lot -- that's a lot of money for news.

So... that's presumably why there are still ads. Gotta pay the reporters somehow.

On the other hand, the New Yorker bugging you to subscribe is just lazy programming, and I hate it too.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/new-york-times-c...

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Here are some more recent numbers [1]:

Quarter 1 2018:

$414m total revenue

$260m subscription revenue (62% of total)

$154m non-subscription revenue (38% of total)

$46.7m digital advertising revenue (37% of total advertising revenue)

$126.2m total advertising revenue

If you cut digital advertising completely, not just for subscribers, you could make it up by increasing subscription price by around 10%, assuming 100% of subscribers would bear the new price.

The interesting statistic that we don't have is how much digital advertising revenue comes from paid vs unpaid readers.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/business/media/new-york-t...

Not sure I follow. If you're using 46.7/260 that's an 18% increase (not 10%), but that's all subscribers (including print), not just digital.

So a yearly print subscription would go from $422.50 to $500 here in New York.

I'm not sure print subscribers would want to subsidize digital readers like that, especially when their own print edition is already chock-full of ads.

Now that I look back at it, I have no idea how I came up with that percentage.

So maybe they should offer a premium subscription, 70% more expensive, with absolutely no ads. Sort of like how Tidal Music have $10 / month compressed music, $20 / month uncompressed.

Hulu did the same, for a while..

> Digital advertising revenue in 2017: $238 million

Is this from advertising to paid subscribers only, or to paid and free both? If it is the latter, your math may be off by orders of magnitude.

Good point. But since there's a paywall of 5 articles per month, while a subscriber presumably reads 100's per month (e.g. even just 5 articles a day = 150/month), it seems reasonable the majority of advertising revenue comes from subscribers, or close to it.

Sure there are viral articles that get bigger traction, and it's a "soft" paywall when coming from social media or search, but they're been significantly increasing restrictions on the soft paywall over the past year to impose both daily and monthly limits.

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