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New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers
- mandeepj 8y agoGreat! On the other hand, someone is not getting tired in calling them "failing NYT" all the time
- fragsworth 8y agoThat is likely to be a major cause for increasing subscriber numbers.
- sigfubar 8y agoWhy would anyone subscribe to NYT when the content is readily available online behind a trivially bypassed paywall?
- p0wn 8y agoOld people that use the internet.
- zatkin 8y agoI'm 27 and I pay for a digital subscription. Relative to the average age of the world, I'd say I'm "young".
- tryptophan 8y agoTo pay for a service that they get? To support their journalism?
- Judgmentality 8y agoIf nobody pays for it then pretty soon it won't be available at any cost to anyone.
- pasiaj 8y agoBecause they want to suppport the creation of high quality journalism? Or because getting around the paywall is not trivial for everyone. Or because of the other benefits that subscribers get that others do not. Or because, for some, using a credit card is easier than some technical option.
- theDoug 8y agoConvenience and consistent access to a high quality experience. It's been shown time and again to work. At a certain age it's reasonable to consider one's time to have a non-zero value. It's what leads people to pay $10 a month to stream music, and even access movies, despite means which infringe on copyright being generally "free," easy, and also trivially accessed.
- dubrocks 8y agoNot as trivially-bypassed on mobile, I presume.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mehrdadn 8y agoOpen in incognito? (Not advocating bypassing, just responding to your comment.)
- n_ 8y agoI pay to support their journalism. The amount that I consume is probably less than what requires a subscription, but I started paying because I can afford it, and I feel like it’s important for them to have resources to do what they do.
- glup 8y agoBecause I want it to be around in two years.
- vkat 8y agoI used to do that then one day I read that there were layoffs to cut costs, I subscribed that very day. If you can afford to pay and you consume the service then $9 per month is not a lot.
- taurath 8y agoI like their app - especially that I can just do a refresh and then offline view, which makes plane trips when I don't want to pay for wifi much more pleasant. They're also relatively sparse with their breaking news push notifications, so for the most part I don't feel like I need to "worry check" other news sites - if its of decent importance I'll get a push.
- DonHopkins 8y agoI love all the great open source software they've supported. https://d3js.org/ https://d3js.org/ https://www.quora.com/What-JavaScript-library-does-the-New-York-Times-website-use-for-infographics https://www.quora.com/What-JavaScript-library-does-the-New-Y... https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3k3if4/hi_im_mike_bostock_creator_of_d3js_and_a_former/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3k3if4/hi_... https://svelte.technology/ https://svelte.technology/ https://rollupjs.org/guide/en https://rollupjs.org/guide/en https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16247571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16247571 um304 6 months ago [-] NYT has a history of hiring engineering rockstars. I believe creators of libraries like BackboneJS, UnderscoreJS, and D3 were at NYT when they had invented those amazing pieces of work. danso 6 months ago [-] I think Bostock had already created D3 by the time the NYT hired him: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3k3if4/hi_.. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3k3if4/hi_.... rich_harris 6 months ago [-] In fact, the creator of Backbone and Underscore — Jeremy Ashkenas — worked on this article until he left the NYT last year (to join the creator of D3, Mike Bostock, at https://observablehq.com https://observablehq.com)
- lovelearning 8y agoSome people are ethical.
- slig 8y agoDo you use adblock?
- jrgaston 8y agoBecause it's well written and a good source of news that I've long been happy to support.
- peteretep 8y agoThere's a few companies -- NYT, The Economist, WashPo -- that I pay for, and then spend time bypassing their paywalls, because their implementations are so irritating.
- nicodjimenez 8y agoGood for them! But is it good for us? I don't know how I feel about news organizations (liberal or conservative) profiting from the Donald Trump era.
- robotron 8y agoYes, it's good for us. The more sources of journalism the better.
- westpfelia 8y agoWell... the other option is that they dont profit, lose money, and close shop. Sooo.... Profit is good.
- DonHopkins 8y agoIf the NYT and Washington Post profit and win awards by covering Watergate and Russiagate, and just happen to depose Nixon and Trump in the process of reporting the truth, that's Capitalism at its finest. https://russiagateposter.com/russiagate-poster/ https://russiagateposter.com/russiagate-poster/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mey 8y agoAs a paid sub, really don't like that they still attempt to blast you with ads.
- dazc 8y agoThis was my experience with The Times in the UK plus equally difficult to unsubscribe.
- akhatri_aus 8y agoIf you use Revolut to sign up with a virtual card you can just disable the card if you want to unsubscribe and they're difficult about it
- glup 8y agoTry https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper, should be ad free for subscribers (it's a closer approximation to the actual print version)
- lkurusa 8y agoI would also like to recommend https://app.nytimes.com/ https://app.nytimes.com/ , which is a different approach to the same content.
- nemild 8y agoThe Today's Paper link is also a good way to scrape for data analysis (the API isn't great), such as this piece I did looking at their coverage over a decade: The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html
- crazygringo 8y agoYeah that's a tough one for me. I hate it too, it seems "off" with the rest of the internet. But on the other hand, print subscriptions have always included ads too, so not really sure what's right.
- TheAceOfHearts 8y agoIt's surprising to see how small they are. Only 3.8 million subscribers, and you have to imagine that some percentage of that barely reads their content. I wonder if there's public numbers estimating how many people in total read the New York Times, and how it compares to emerging forms of media and entertainment like YouTube. One criticism of New York Times that I've read online is that they won't allow you to cancel your digital subscription through their website. They force you to call them. I'm not sure if that has changed recently, but that's a pretty questionable dark pattern.
- chriskanan 8y agoThe main page only gives the phone number, but in the policy they also provide an email address you can communicate with to cancel [1]. Still, that is pretty frustrating when it should just be a few clicks. I recently had to turn off cable internet, which took an hour long conversation as the only method available, whereas turning off the power to the apartment took about 30 seconds after logging into their platform. [1] https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115015852367-Digital-subscriptions https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115015852367-Digi...
- comex 8y agoThey apparently have no fewer than 130 million monthly readers, though, according to a press release from last year: https://www.nytco.com/year-of-audience/ https://www.nytco.com/year-of-audience/ I̶ ̶g̶u̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶b̶u̶y̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶s̶p̶a̶p̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶d̶i̶v̶i̶d̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶.̶ [edit: that number isn't for physical newspapers, see replies]
- johnpowell 8y agoMy mom delivers papers for the New York Times. The pay is garbage but she is old and getting Social Security. She likes to drive around and people-watch. She is also on the route that mostly delivers to Starbucks, Safeway, the airport, 7/11, and Albertsons. It is the best route since you just drop 20 papers on the doorstep of a Starbucks. She delivers about 500 papers a night. And she is just one of the 20+ drivers in our city of 180K people. So people do still buy them.
- beefeater 8y agoRacism pays.
- SpecialistEMT 8y agoWhat? This is not reddit, boy.
- pnw_hazor 8y agoBoy? #cancelboys
- illuminati1911 8y agoWish they went bankcrupt. World or the US don’t need media companies openly supporting and defending racism.
- gear54rus 8y agoAny links to that?
- illuminati1911 8y agoToo many to even count. Google Sarah Jeong + NYT.
- ppbutt 8y agoThanks for the tip. Shame on them.
- zorkw4rg 8y agoWeird why is that getting flagged/downvoted? Isn't that a legitimate topic of discussion? It should be possible to at least point out the facts of what happened. She wrote some tweets in the past that some people interpreted as racist against white people, nyt responded by arguing that it was just a reflection of the hateful rhetoric she received as an asian person. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/08/03/an-asian-american-womans-tweets-ignite-a-debate-is-it-okay-to-make-fun-of-white-people-online/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/08...
- eksemplar 8y agoIs it a legitimate topic for discussion though? If you can become president after calling Mexicans criminal rapists, I think you should be allowed to be a journalist after those tweets, especially when you’ve expressed regret and remorse for posting them. People really should uninstall twitter though. I mean, I’ve never written things that were racist, but I’m really happy there isn’t a permanent record of everything I’ve ever posted online. What I do find interesting is why the same people who are angry that Alex Jones got banned seem to want her fired. And I guess you can say exactly the same about the people who want Trump banned from twitter, but are fine with these tweets. Over all America seems like such a circus these days.
- sngz 8y agoi would pay for their subscription if they didnt blast me with ads even after paying.
- notatoad 8y agonot only do they advertise to you after you pay, if you are running adblock they attempt to guilt you into disabling it. it's especially galling because the washington post costs me $27/year and doesn't bug me to disable my adblocker, and nytimes is $12/mo plus a guilt trip about "supporting journalism".
- ehsankia 8y agoAnd after seeing how bullshit their unsubscribe flow is, I don't think I'll be joining back any time soon. As much as I want to support their work, these dark patterns are despicable.
- agumonkey 8y agoreminds me of wikipedia. 1) [massive funding campaign banner plea] 2) funds and visit wikipedia again 3) [massive funding campaign banner plea] .. I don't know, use a cookie to make the banner smaller at least..
- taurath 8y agoI would pay another couple dollars a month to not have ads in the app (though I am thankful that they tend to not be hugely intrusive). Overall pretty happy with the service.
- alpb 8y agoAgreed. I hate my NYT subscription exactly for this reason. But I’m tempted to keep it to support them. What a sad reading experience: they show the same ad 6 times in a short article. NYT employees: please lobby internally for this. We can pay 2$ more for no ads. How much % of the ad traffic is subscription users anyway?
- gandutraveler 8y agoI love their 'The Daily' podcast. They pick one topic everyday and dive deep over 30 mins. Overall a happy NYT subscribed for last 6 months. I paid 110$ for 1 year membership and got a free Google home device. Great deal!
- _carl_jung 8y agoThis smells a little shilly. Glad for you if not though.
- zorkw4rg 8y agoI listen to the Daily as well, definitely recommended no shill. https://www.nytimes.com/podcasts/the-daily https://www.nytimes.com/podcasts/the-daily
- sunsetMurk 8y agoThat's on my daily rotation too; but I still don't sub to NYT. After seeing the low NYT subscriber #'s in this thread, it's amazing to me how much reach 'new media' creators have. There are hundreds of YouTubers that get more eyeballs daily. Crazy.
- spondyl 8y agoAs much as I like the NYT, as mentioned below, their unsubscribe functionality sucks. I sent them an email last December requesting to unsubscribe. I didn't follow up on it and eventually forgot about it. Eventually, they email me around May to apologise that my email was "delayed" due to a technical glitch they had just discovered. Great but I still never got an actual unsubscription processed. A few months later, around July while doing a "subscription spring cleaning", I called them up to cancel it. The guy asked why I was leaving (6 months+ with no customer support answer) and promptly processed my cancellation. A few weeks later, I was emailed a "resubscription offer" which genuinely frustrated me as you might imagine.
- alpb 8y agoTheir mobile app is worse: Any article shows 7 instances of the same ad in a rather short article. So any article is basically 70% ads. This is even when you have a paid subscription. Even the NYT lost the high ground on the ad-free reading game.
- majewsky 8y ago> A few weeks later, I was emailed a "resubscription offer" which genuinely frustrated me as you might imagine. If it's a single one, I don't think they're overdoing it. Resubscription offers are pretty much standard practice. I know some people who regularly cancel their cellphone contract after the minimum duration in order to get discount offers for the next contract period.
- spondyl 8y agoI get them every other week generally. It was more the timing that annoyed me, haha
- kpennell 8y agoSame. They completely ignored my unsubscribe email?
- bdz 8y agoI'd sub if the basic package included the crosswords too
- acomjean 8y agoIt’s strange it doesn’t include the full crossword. I really like the mini crossword game however and “set” puzzles
- chx 8y agoI subscribed the moment they hired Susan Flower (susanthesquark). We often call for the boycott of bad actors so we should reward the good actors, I feel. I couldn't subscribe again when they hired Sarah Jeong (sarahjeong) but if I could, I would do it again in a heartbeat.
- ethanwillis 8y agohttps://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1026286610516594690 https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/102628661051659469... Since everyone is talking about the "racist" tweets. Maybe we should also remember how Sarah dog piled onto Naomi Wu.
- ageek123 8y agoCan you say more about why it's a good thing that they hired Sarah Jeong, who has a history of racist and sexist tweets?
- peteretep 8y agoIt's interesting, I wasn't at all aware of her until a day or two ago. The first link I read about her was this: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/3/17644704/sarah-jeong-new-york-times-tweets-backlash-racism https://www.vox.com/2018/8/3/17644704/sarah-jeong-new-york-t... Which shows her "racist" tweets, and shows how they're only really racist if you strip away all context for them. It then shows how the alt-right use this as a tactic. I found that very interesting, and I also now find it interesting to see who comments on these. Do you think Vox -- without attacking it as a source here -- is wrong that these Tweets have been read out of context? Were you aware that they were? Why do you repeat this talking point?
- Scea91 8y agoThe context should be provided in the Vox article but it is not. Is there any article where all of the offensive tweets are available in their context?
- 8y ago
- akhatri_aus 8y agoWhile that's great they should have taken a page out of Nasper's book who used to look up to the NYT as to what to be in the digital world.
- bumholio 8y agoThere seems to be a natural opportunity for ISPs in a certain country to pay to have all their customers unblocked by major publications relevant to that public - and have a certain fraction of the customer bill disbursed depending on online circulation. I would gladly pay 20% more to my ISP to have hassle free access to major online publications, knowing that revenue helps journalists produce quality news, and that I only pay for what I use. instead of New York Times having 3 million subscribers for 9$/a month and lose a good part of that revenue on customer acquisition and card fees, they could have 100 million subscribers at 30c each, their respective revenue share from a $5-10 ISP bill price increase. While at the same time, supporting 30 other papers the size of NYT, or thousands of smaller, local ones. That's because the NYT online success story is a very rare bird today.
- ethanwillis 8y agoGreat, then you can pay the extra 20% on my ISP bill.
- fingerlocks 8y agoI like this idea, but I wonder, would that be a net neutrality violation? Honest question, because I can easily imagine this being rephrased: “If you don’t pay for the extra news package, you cannot access NYT for free”.
- bumholio 8y agoI think the intent behind net neutrality is not to prevent bundling but technical discrimination. Your ISP can bundle free Hulu with your data plan, as long as you can also get Netflix and Youtube at the same quality with no bandwidth throttling. So as long as there is no technical discrimination and you can access and subscribe to other news sources, net neutrality is respected.
- leereeves 8y agoThere's no such thing as a free Hulu. If your ISP is taking a share of your subscription fee and giving it to Hulu, your subscription will cost more.
- Dwolb 8y agoThat’s just insane. This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry. NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever. If NYT is the best at this and can only turn 24M a quarter, almost everyone else must be absolutely bleeding. This would confirm most of the newspapers out there are indeed running failed business models with zero opportunity for success. The reason this is worrisome is going forward there will be less and less ‘diversity’ in the reporting ecosystem. Instead of 50 professional reporters confirmed writing about an event, we’ll have 5. Reality and facts will be more about picking teams than believing the consensus. In the age of leaders publicly gaslighting, unrefereed global forums of social media which can be bought, and massive concentration of wealth at the top, fewer and consolidated reporting entities will be bad for the republic.
- Illniyar 8y agoIs 100M$ a year profit, not revenue but profit, a low amount for a newspaper to make? that seems to me like a fair amount to be at the top. If other newspapers make a tenth of the profit, that should still be an acceptable market? no? Edit: with 3700 employes (per Wikipedia) that's put their profit to be about 27000$ per employee. That's 4 times as much as walmart. From what I can tell it's also more then IBM and probably higher then most non-tech, non-oil businesses
- csomar 8y agoThe tech bubble really skewed the perception field of many people.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> tech bubble I think OP misread the quarterly figure as an annual one. “Tech bubble” usually applies to companies with much less than $100 million of profits.
- 8y ago
- unixhero 8y agoOfftopic: I am a European, and I like to read quality journalism. Which do you recommend, a subscruption to Washington Post or NYT?
- matt4077 8y agoThe NYT is still far ahead of the WP. I like to get the actual print edition once in a while. On the weekends, it's positively massive. It's also far cheaper than any comparable subscriptions in my European country (Germany), at least for the first year. Another alternative I want to mention is The New Yorker: It's something like 1 Euro per week for the actual print edition, and it's a beautiful magazine both in style as well as in its content.
- naturalgradient 8y agoThe Washington Post. The NYT is unapologetically taking a side in the culture war and on many issues (campus politics, feminism, title IX, migration..) will ever only let one side make their point. The Wapo in my observation has a much better mix of both sides.
- rtpg 8y agoThis is not a proper representation of NYT's opinion board. Beyond the absolutely dishonest stuff of more recent hires to the op-ed board, they have multiple conservatives on the board repeatedly publishing their "actually the problem is the leftist college students" every couple of months. They also have a couple "mainstream liberals" publishing inoffensive (but rarely courageous) pieces that usually match what centrists want to hear. the WSJ subsidizes a lot of bow-tie conservatives, but the NYT is also granting credibility to a lot of bankrupt lines of thought that have no actual real support in this country. Banning abortion has less than 20% support in the US, yet if you read the opinion pages of the NYT you could only think that both sides have roughly equal support. Really newspapers shouldn't have opinion pages. It's literally the comments section of their newspaper. Just let journalists call a duck a duck, so then you don't need the opinion pages to point out that, maybe X is bad.
- 8y ago
- commenter1 8y agoWhy would anyone pay for news is beyond my understanding. I pay for things I enjoy, not things that make my blood boil.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- naturalgradient 8y agoThe greatest marketing trick the NYT has ever pulled off is presenting themselves as the last bastion of objectivity in the trump era. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the most recent Sarah Jeong controversy and virtually all reporting on migration, feminism, campus politics etc shows this. Mind you this is from a European perspective where I see almost all reporting about politics here as copying off talking points from the far left. This is the true genius of their marketing though: They are actually as polarized as any other source in the culture war, but market themselves to an audience that likes to think of themselves as rational, objective, sensible.
- colordrops 8y agoThis is why these big papers still exist despite questionable profit mechanisms. They are propaganda mouth pieces. There's a reason billionaires buy newspaper companies.
- radmuzom 8y agoIt need not be a trick. I subscribed the day Trump won because I wanted to support what is generally considered “left-wing” sources. I am also strongly anti-conservative and anti-libertarian, and generally agree with the NYT stance on most issues.
- zarkov99 8y agoeven their incoherent stance on racism as illustrated in the Sarah Jeong debacle? I could live with a left bias but not their blatant hypocrisy.
- rainonmoon 8y agoTheir stance is Jeong used to imitate the language of her harassers, has since learned that was wrong, and has apologised. We should all be seeking rehabilitation, not retribution, and although I personally don't think her tweets were particularly objectionable, her remorse should earn her a second chance.
- 8y ago
- xer 8y agoIt should say "Thanks to cuts"
- bufferoverflow 8y agoYeah, but now that they refused to fire the openly racist Sarah Jeong, their credibility went to zero for me. I hope they lose subscribers over this.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gearhart 8y agoThe NYT has been paying roughly the same amount each year for production of news for the last few years, and a steadily increasing amount of "general, sales and admin", even as their gross income from subscriptions has shot up, and their income from advertising has plummeted.[1] I really struggle with that. That isn't how this is supposed to work. Escaping the broken advertising model and moving to a reader-funded model is supposed to give you scope to shake off overheads, to clarify your business's purpose and to slimline and focus operations to improve the quality of content at the price point. That's the mantra for the new renaissance of journalism, in which the NYT has been hailed as a massive success story. I don't by any means mean to denigrate the NYT - they produce some excellent reporting, but it seems that from a business perspective there is something askew here. The Guardian in the UK has managed to do exactly what was expected - the proportion of their staff who are journalists has increased steadily for a decade as their revenue split has shifted towards subscription, and their finances have steadily improved (they're still not in the black, but it looks like they will be this year, for the first time since the business model fell apart). On the other side, it seems like the NYT are posting profits, but without fundamentally reshaping the business. There is a massive backlash in this thread against dark patterns to prevent subscriber loss and continued advertising even after subscription. It feels like the company may be selling the goodwill and brand value that are the cornerstone to the reader-funded, reader-focused new age of journalism in order to get their profit margins looking healthy, despite failing to cut overheads, which is where the profit increases in this new model ought to be coming from. I would really, deeply like to be shown to be wrong. We need sustainable, reader-funded businesses producing great journalism and I want to think the NYT is one of them. [1] https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2017/Final-2017-Annual-Report.pdf https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2... (page 55)
- lerie 8y agoI just disable javascript to read full articles from news places like this that force subscriptions. or maybe I just dont understand why people would subscribe digitally? Are there different articles? I think people have moved away from what the internet is supposed to be, which is a way to share information, not force people to pay for information :/
- megaman22 8y agoThe only part of the New York Times worth paying money for is the crossword. I was a subscriber for a couple years, but after a while you start noticing that all the opinion pieces and non-A section articles seem to be on about a six week loop, and you just keep reading the same piece that's been dusted off and reworked over and over and over again.
- fhood 8y agoWhat about the news? You know, that thing they do apart from opinion pieces and the crossword puzzles.
- greenpizza13 8y agoI purchased an annual digital subscription and I'm never even logged into NYT. I get my news from various sources, including NYT, but I don't go to NYT for news, it comes to me through Reddit and Apple news. I consider the subscription more of a donation, because we are living in a time where the news media has to be supported -- we can't have it die. I wonder if my use case resonates with other people my age.
- iscrewyou 8y agoI’m in the same boat. I open the app maybe once or twice a week. But I support their work and effort. I’ll pay more once my student loans are done.
- kyleblarson 8y agoI canceled my subscription recently after they hired a racist tech editor.
- thrillgore 8y ago24 Mil is a really really bad read for the NYT. This means newspapers are in a bad way.
- paulcole 8y agoI pay $40 a year for the crossword only and it's a great deal. Includes the archives, too!
- tschellenbach 8y agoI pay for the Economist and think it's worth every penny. Wonder how many magazines/news sites can actually get users to pay for their content though. I suspect the number is low.