How much more would you be willing to pay to go entirely ad-free?
From the NYT annual report [1], it appears that they made ~$1B in subscription revenue and $0.5B in advertising revenue last year. If you're willing to pay >50% more (if you can afford more, you're probably more valuable as an advertising target), NYT is probably interested.
[1] https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2...
So while I do agree newspapers have always been ads with some news thrown in there to get people to look at the paper, there were some much higher costs there in the paper part of the newspaper (and printers and delivery people and so on). In theory the cost of how I read "the paper" now should be much lower, so if I pay to subscribe to the website maybe there shouldn't be ANY ads? Or far fewer?
I guess my thinking is nytimes.com isn't the same thing as The NY Times I get delivered to my house, so maybe things like ads should be treated in a different way? Sure the people that make it and reporters and news and all that are the same, but how I consume the actual thing is significantly different and has a different cost model.
Plus those print ads were/are WAY different in so many ways.
There is also a higher cost to the subscriber to receive a newspaper compared to digital delivery, IIRC. So it is still proportional.
Distribution costs went down, but so did ad revenue.
It used to be that a subscription primarily paid for the cost of printing/distribution, and the real profit came from advertising. Unfortunately, print ads use to pay significantly more than web ads do today. So while the distribution costs are lower, most newspapers now need both revenue sources.
There are multiple moving ads in between paras of a long form online articles which is a much worse experience than reading the same article in print.
If too many users don't expect to see ads once they subscribe, then it doesn't matter what the cost model is; NYT has to adapt to the market's demands, change their costs, or shut down.
1) Free = 10 articles per month 2) Basic subscription = Unlimited articles, with ads 3) Premier subscription = Unlimited articles and no ads.
NYT's sales pitch to advertisers is access to the intellectual/monetary elite. Saying "here, you can access only the less spendy ones" isn't going to be good.
https://www.statista.com/chart/3755/digital-subscribers-of-t...
It's not that users don't expect to see ads that revenue is down. It's that the ad-sell business has been effectively taken over by a few large actors who promise all kinds of growth because of their targeted/tracking ad networks.
And presently ad revenue is down even further because many businesses first spending cuts were in advertising for Q2/Q3 since they aren't operating anyway. That said, this last point is only speaking from my own present industry experience.
Newspaper journalism has been a joke the entire time too, so it’s not clear what your point is. The NyTimes is a shining example of how having two sets of customers to please lowers the quality of reported news.
This article posted yesterday about cascading collapses seems relevant: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/5/4/covid-and-c...
Business models that used to work well can collapse in a hurry.
So actually it's peanuts, not 50% more.
Back then the digital vision wasn't in those media centres. They got online quickly, but they were not operating active engineering departments. Their industry was news. Advertising was a supplement, not the primary business. Hindsight is 20/20, for sure, though.
I think this is a good move by NYT. I only wish the companies I've been associated with had the kind of resources to do the same. But it's expensive to even start something like that. For many companies in the space the resources are already spread thin.