The New York Times’ App Plan Isn’t Working, So It’s Laying Off Staff
recode.net
recode.net
Two, there's a gap between what people feel is a "fair rate" for the Times and what is actually a fair rate for the Times. People in this thread find it "violently offensive" that the print edition of the Times costs less than the digital-only version, despite the fact that if you look at the ad spending on each, it absolutely makes sense for the Times to charge you less if you buy the more fully ad-subsidized print version. And all of your comparisons (iTunes, Kindle) are third-party sellers of other people's works. They don't care if the writers or musicians make money or not. iTunes/Kindle also aren't the only source of income for those writers and musicians. The New York Times is responsible for providing its own content, and they need to make enough money to pay for that content.
It's gone up a lot in the past decade, I remember when it was $1, I think. Although I am having surprising trouble finding historical single-issue or subscription print prices on the web.
But I think people used to pay hundreds of dollars a year for print subscriptions, even back when the weekday cover price was only $1. Of course, there was less competition for world news pre-internet, but, as much as I'm unwilling to pay those prices either, I also understand that there's no way they can keep producing the same coverage on orders of magnitude less income.
But here's the thing. Printing is somewhat efficient if you look at it from a manufacturing standpoint. A huge machine spitting out automatically a bunch of papers taking a web of paper and a final folded product ready for the drivers to take to delivery spots all over. (I was in the industry years ago it's a well oiled machine of productivity for what it does. Same thing every day.)
Of course that costs money but typically the cost of the delivered paper is supposed to cover all of that. Break even as the story is told. Subscription price covers the cost of the printing and distribution so they can sell ads and claim circulation. The high priced ads cover the price of the other structure which they still have to pay even if they discontinue the print operation and that of course (look they have a building and staff in Manhattan) is super expensive.
One of my neighbors started stealing the paper, recently, so I don't even have to take it to the recycling bin myself. What a deal! Not exactly how I'd run _my_ business, though.
Ultimately, I read the Times every day on my phone and computer, and often peruse the archives, so I'd be happy to pay more. But I'd like transparency and to not play the game that ups their offline circulation numbers.
I'd also like the ads to go away, so that I'm paying for the journalism, not the advertisers. But whatever, I'll take what I can get.
Until the rocket scientists at the NYT get that through their pointy little heads, nothing is going to change.
"violently offensive"? Without getting into a debate about the environment... hyperbole much? It's amazing what people get violently offended by in the first-world. What a sense of entitlement we all have. Sorry someone who works on pricing at the NY Times made a mistake and it offended you so much. I guess when you watch the news and see all the pain and suffering around the world for no reason you must get nuclear offended, right?
Oh sorry did my comment also "violently offend" you? People are offended by a lot of things these days. I think it's worth pointing out when the word is used frivolously - because it's an important word.
That said, it's kind of disingenuous of the Times to charge the advertiser for an impression when I just recycle my paper without reading it.
If you don't think $450 is worth unlimited online access and home delivery for the Sunday edition, I'm not sure what to do for you. The main cost of reading the news is the time you lose. Why would you spend several hours per week reading something that you think isn't worth $8 per week? It's an inherently contradictory position.
Worms, meet the world outside the can. You're going to love it.
There are at least two valid reasons. First, the time cost and the money cost are additive. It could be that you value reading the news at more than the time it takes to do it but not by $450/year.
Second, there is an opportunity cost. It's plausible that you might be choosing between two newspapers that have comparable coverage, in which case the subscription rate (or lack thereof) could easily break the tie.
Starting software engineers bill out at $100 an hour. If you spend 5 hours a week reading the news, the total cost per year in terms of your time is $26,000. Thus the cost of the newspaper itself is 1.7% of the overall cost. The claim that a price cut to something that only contributes 1.7% to the total cost is going to make reading the newspaper worth it is ridiculous on its face. The same rebuttal applies for differentiating between newspapers.
Also, there is a strong argument to be made that businesses should not be targeting or care about people who think a 1.7% price cut makes a difference.
Things don't have to be fungible to be cumulative.
> Starting software engineers bill out at $100 an hour.
Billing rates are irrelevant because time and money are not fungible. For example, I can read the newspaper on the train for 25 minutes each way, but it isn't possible to productively use that time for much else because of the constraints of the environment, so the value (i.e. opportunity cost) of using that time is much lower than most other times.
Also, most New York Times readers are not software developers. The average American hourly wage is less than a quarter of the one you're using.
> The claim that a price cut to something that only contributes 1.7% to the total cost is going to make reading the newspaper worth it is ridiculous on its face.
Amdahl's law explains why this is wrong. If you pay $2000/month for a mortgage, why squabble over $40/month difference in the interest rate? Because $40/month is $40/month. You gain more by reducing a $2040/month expense to $2000/month (even though it's only a ~2% reduction) than by reducing a $20/month expense to $1/month (even though it's a 95% reduction). The percentage of the total is completely irrelevant.
Amdahl's law doesn't mean what you think it means; it specifically refutes your position. To spell it out: a 100% reduction in 1.7% of the cost is irrelevant to the total cost despite the fact that 100% is a big number.
Would it help if you thought of the New York Times not as that disposable paper publication available for roughly $3 at every airport and newsstand, but as a hip new digital news service that sources original journalism from trained professionals, and curates that content by an (ideally) independent cadre of other professionals?
How much would you pay for that hot new subscription service, to fund the level of baseline quality you get from the NYT? I don't know about you, but even $5/week doesn't sound completely unreasonable, to have something a little more sober than Buzzfeed and Vice.
I don't know. But I pay $8.95 a month for Netflix, another $9 for Hulu Plus, another $9 for Spotify. I also get Amazon Prime for about $8/month and HN/reddit are free. It's not whether NYT is worth $35+/mo, it's whether I can derive $35/mo of utility from it.
I agree that given the content is what you're looking for, the price really isn't that obscene. But the nickle and dime/piecemeal aspect of it is.
With the Guardian website also being totally free and their online circulation rapidly increasing, I'd say the NYT should be watching carefully.
I'd been paying them $240 a year for their hackassed 'you can read it on a tablet and the web but not on a phone' plan. Then I got the new iPhone XXL, and suddenly was interested in reading news on my phone after all (since this new model finally has a screen big enough to read text on).
But I couldn't, due to having the wrong subscription type, and then I had to do the multiple-annoying-step process of finding the old subscription, turning it off, then adding the new subscription that let me read it on a phone and the web but NOT on a tablet... at the end of which their app told me I had to log in. Which I did, but it then told me 'Fuck you, customer, that email is associated with a different subscription' (to paraphrase).
So I just canceled everything and deleted the NY Times app.
In this era, it's an amazing achievement to get a lot of people willing to pay money to read your news content. It's sad that the NY Times fucked that up so badly with their insane pricing and convoluted subscription choices.
Their pricing model charges you X for Web access. Okay so far. They've decided to charge for content. Fine.
Their pricing model charges you (X+Y) for web+smartphone. I'm not going to say this is stupid, because obviously apps cost money to develop. Sure, it's the same content I'm viewing on 2 devices, but I'm downloading some app that took literally WEEKS to develop, so I get it.
Their pricing model charges you (X+Z) for web+tablet. This is starting to get silly because I can't really understand why a tablet app costs more to develop than a smartphone app, and anyway, I'm already paying for your content in the "web" portion.
Here's where it gets insulting, and where I refuse to give them a goddamned penny. Web+smartphone+tablet. First off, you're telling me that it's not good enough to pay for web+tablet? I have to pay extra for a smartphone on top of that? Okay, but surely I pay a discounted smartphone rate, right? It's, like, (X+Z+(.5Y)), right? There's no way the esteemed NYTimes would think their customers are so bloody stupid as to not only pay for smartphone access on top of tablet access, but pay FULL PRICE for said smartphone access, right?
WRONG.
NYTimes wants you to pay 2X+Y+Z for web+web+tablet+smartphone access. Look it up, I'm not joking here. They insist that their product is so valuable, that not only should you pay extra to access their web content on a tablet or smartphone, and not only should you pay the SAME AMOUNT for each of the web+tablet+smartphone, they think their customers are so bloody stupid that they should double pay for web content. Their most valuable customers, who want to pay for all digital access should be the ones who get ripped the most.
And, as pointed out elsewhere in these comments, this is more than paying for dead trees shipped to your house every day, and throwing them in the trash.
And then their advertising materials treat their allegedly valuable content as if I'm buying some cut-rate TV service. 4 week teaser rates. Really? 4 week discounts on content that, I'd hope, most users would plan to subscribe to for years if not decades?
Get over yourselves, NYTimes. You've turned a class of people who would otherwise respect your work and who actually desire to pay for it into people who actively dislike you and celebrate your failure.
The Times puts up too many obstacles to becoming a subscriber in the digital age, as others have mentioned.
Also, either I'm oblivious or they're doing a terrible job marketing their spinoffs. I read the Times daily, on both my phone and at a desktop, and am definitely in their target demo for NYT Cooking, but I haven't even heard of it. I already subscribe to Cook's Illustrated and visit sites like Serious Eats regularly; how is it I didn't know about their new venture?
(http://cooking.nytimes.com/ looks amazing, by the way. I'm disappointed I had to hear about it in the context of these job cuts.)
And how are they "crying that it's everyone else's fault they are losing money?"
This is probably a big part of the problem. Online ad revenues aren't going to equal those for print, simply because there is so much more visibility into targeting, reach and conversions. Thus, advertisers have a much better idea of the value of an impression/click, and can price accordingly, rather than indiscriminately shot-gunning eyeballs as in print.
Entrenched cost structures contribute to the problem, but the fact is that paying a professional staff to produce quality content every day costs a lot of money, and online there are fewer dollars coming in per reader, even if the total audience is much larger. The exception to this downward trend is if you have content catering to highly lucrative niches such as insurance or banking (although I don't know how these compare to similarly placed print ads).
Premium video has a similar problem; advertising revenue is unsustainable for anything other than indie YouTube shows. The broadcast TV model could never work on the Internet.
At least, that's my theory.
For premium, wouldn't the conversion be easier? Having HBO bill me $12/month through my cable company or $12/month through their app doesn't make a difference to me as an already paying user.
The mechanics of video subscriptions is an interesting discussion for another time, however it's not certain whether a completely a'la carte offering would be sustainable for HBO -- it definitely wouldn't be for most smaller channels. As much as people might dislike it sometimes, there are economies of scale to bundling.
"Many newspaper executives view Craigslist as a nemesis because it doesn't charge for most ads. As Craigslist and scores of other websites have offered free or less expensive alternatives, newspapers' total revenue from the classified advertising in print editions has waned from a peak of nearly $20 billion in 2000 to about $10 billion last year.
Meanwhile, Craigslist has been raking in more revenue from the ad listings that it does charge for in major U.S. markets. Most of the money comes from help-wanted ads — another former cash cow for newspapers that has been drying up.
Craigslist's annual revenue has risen from just $7 million in 2003 to $81 million last year, according to the AIM Group. Based on its count of paid ads appearing on Craigslist in recent months, the company's revenue should be about $100 million this year, the consultants predicted."
Craigslist is that whole "your margin is my opportunity" thing everyone loves to throw around. Craigslist took over the market because they charged less than anyone else, and they could charge less because their margin on classified ads was lower than anybody's. Newspapers couldn't compete with Craigslist on margins because they were using those margins to subsidize the actual news-gathering apparatus, which was a loss leader to get people to buy the paper so they could put ads in it.
1) http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/13/ny-nyu-stern-schoo... 2) http://aimgroup.com/2012/11/07/craigslist-2012-revenues-incr... 3) http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=7804695
It's not surprising that a large organization would have throwaway products, it's just a shame for a financially-strapped org to continue having such bureaucratic machinations at such a critical time in its history.
Readers feel strongly about this organization - there must be some who want to give more.
If you're a liberal, I'm sure its pretty fantastic. As someone who considers themselves an independent, this newspaper is unabashedly liberal.
Perhaps this is having an effect on its subscribers?
Why are subscribers (and advertisers) of The New York Times fleeing to other newspapers (such as the Wall Street Journal, whose circulation numbers have remained steady), or to other avenues such as Fox News, for their news and information?
There is only one answer: The New York Times has a proclivity towards left-wing bias and unbalanced reporting of the news.
Even a cursory glance of the paper reveals its pervasive editorializing, which comes through loud and clear everywhere from page one to the obituaries. But just as damaging to it than its left-wing slant has been its complete lack of interest in any stories having the remotest possibility of tarnishing the hallowed image of President Barack Obama, an image which it and other members of the so-called "main-stream media" has had such an active role in creating.
source (2009): http://www.newsrealblog.com/2009/10/21/liberal-bias-is-killi...
Paywall hasn't delivered the results for Mr Murdoch or anyone else in the UK that have gone that route. The highly invested in The Guardian and the Daily Mail are doing very nicely in the UK and around the world. Which is interesting because the UK is a smaller country than the US and the newspapers-of-old converged on London and gave up on the regions a long time ago. (The Guardian used the be The Manchester Guardian). The problem with U.S. titles is the brands are too geographic - NY Times is New York which is not a global thing and New York really is not the centre of the universe.
The Guardian do not make money. However charging people to read the news is not possible in the UK when the BBC do it all for free. Hence The Guardian run the ads, charge for the dating/car-buying/employment options.
These news organisations that complain need to go away. It is easier than ever to put together 'news', the extra bits they need beyond the standard newswire feed - Associated Press et al. - can be grabbed off of the internets. Journalists haven't been getting out and about for a while, they just cut and paste. What disappoints me more is this:
http://www.schnews.org.uk/stories/AND-FINALLY/
A 'zine shutting down.
Oh, wait, that's probably not what you were referring to at all, is it?
Some excerpts from that self-critique:
"Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is. ... These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed... http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/opinion/the-public-editor-...
"if you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world...
"On a topic that has produced one of the defining debates of our time, Times editors have failed to provide the three-dimensional perspective balanced journalism requires. This has not occurred because of management fiat, but because getting outside one's own value system takes a great deal of self-questioning...
The NYT is a remarkable institution capable of arguably the best news reporting on the planet when it collectively sets its mind to a task. It will cover the difficult local topics like NYC homelessness and public school failures that are a poorer fit for the Post or WSJ. I have friends who work there; my editor before I left to found recent.io is now a NYT editor. But the above critique was true when written in 2004 and is even more true today.
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You can't—canceling requires a phone call with a lengthy wait on hold and a customer-retention sales pitch before they'll let you off the hook.
Sometimes I think about subscribing again, but thinking about that wasted 15 minutes of my life is enough to make me forget about it.