12 ms·

The NYT frustrates me, as I am still forced to see 3rd party ads even after becoming a paying subscriber. There’s no option to go ad-free.

ISL 6y ago
This has been true since approximately the beginning of newspaper-time. 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/2020/Final-2019-Annual-Report.pdf https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2...
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  They should be self hosting ads just like print. If they were smart 20 years ago they could have become Doubleclick.
  - asdff 6y ago
    It would be unblockable too if they just had them as static images in the page. Unless you spent hours tailoring your filters and engaging in an arms race with the sysadmin, you wouldn't ever be able to win and correctly call an image an image and an ad an ad.
  - 52-6F-62 6y ago
    When Doubleclick emerged they were essentially self hosting ads. 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.
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    How do I know they aren't just proxying the request through their servers? It's third party but just transparently loaded through the same server as the rest of the content.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Unfortunately, what has been true since the beginning of newspaper time changes in the digital era, as every newspaper has learned painfully. 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.
  - fma 6y ago
    They could have multiple tiers. 1) Free = 10 articles per month 2) Basic subscription = Unlimited articles, with ads 3) Premier subscription = Unlimited articles and no ads.
    - Kylekramer 6y ago
      Existence of Tier 3 reduces Tier 2's value more than money taken from Tier 3. 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.
  - 52-6F-62 6y ago
    I find it a little funny that you're picking on NYT for that one. They were one of the first to offer digital-only subscriptions and their numbers have been climbing steadily since around 2011 when the introduced their metered paywall. https://www.statista.com/chart/3755/digital-subscribers-of-the-new-york-times/ 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.
- alienreborn 6y ago
  Print ads are so much better than online ads though. - Print ads generally don't break reading lines as most of them are generally between articles or between pages - Print ads don't move. 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.
- blakesterz 6y ago
  There was a real cost to printing single newspaper to me. I've no idea what it was, or is now, but it's about a million times more than the cost of me reading every new story on the NY Times website today. Maybe not a million times, but it's certainly much higher. 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.
  - untog 6y ago
    > There was a real cost to printing single newspaper to me. There is also a higher cost to the subscriber to receive a newspaper compared to digital delivery, IIRC. So it is still proportional.
  - windthrown 6y ago
    It still costs a lot of money to send reporters all over the world and do lengthy investigative journalism, regardless of if it is delivered to you in print or digital format. And NYT does charge more for physical paper delivery than they do for online-only subscriptions.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    > 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 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.
- romanows 6y ago
  They were not interested in providing an ad-free option as of ~1 year ago, I asked.
- blub 6y ago
  A well-known German magazine offers an ad-free experience for 2€. Several newspapers have similar offers. So actually it's peanuts, not 50% more.
- catalogia 6y ago
  > This has been true since approximately the beginning of newspaper-time. This article posted yesterday about cascading collapses seems relevant: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/5/4/covid-and-cascading-collapses https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/5/4/covid-and-c... Business models that used to work well can collapse in a hurry.
- monadic2 6y ago
  > This has been true since approximately the beginning of newspaper-time. 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.
s_dev 6y ago
I don't understand this. I'm a paying subscriber -- I haven't seen any ads. Maybe I'm missing them: https://imgur.com/8oqmgIG https://imgur.com/8oqmgIG Can you show me? Perhaps this is an EU vs US edition thing. I'm EU.
- ardy42 6y ago
  Ads are definitely in the mobile app for paying US subscribers. And, no, I don't mind them. I'm very anti-ad, but financing and having access to functional journalism is more important than avoiding ads.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Arguably it's hard to have a functioning journalism if it's funded - and therefore directed and censored - by the needs of advertisers.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      Yeah, but you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Right now it's like a three-legged stool where advertising revenue is one of the legs.
    - whakim 6y ago
      At the vast majority of publications, there's intentionally no relationship between advertising-type decision-making and what the editorial staff decides to write about.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Except when they write submarine pieces, which are in fact just ads in sheep's clothing. But besides that, advertisers having no direct decision-making powers in news publishing doesn't mean journalism doesn't get corrupted by it. From the POV of the publisher, advertising can be seen as a magic button that makes them a little bit of money each time a visitor presses it. Having it as the main profit source, their primary driver now becomes ensuring as many visitors as possible press this button as frequently as possible. That's how we arrive at reputable publications serving clickbait, writing outrage-inducing noninformative articles, and embedding chumboxes in their articles. That's how the "invented pyramid" - the golden standard of news publishing that nobody cares about anymore - became dead and buried.
sammycdubs 6y ago
I honestly would be less frustrated if their ads weren't so obnoxious and ugly. Animated ads in the middle of an article are the absolute worst.
- pletsch 6y ago
  The opposite of this is Google-like ads where they're blended so much into the page you have to look out for them
romanows 6y ago
I canceled my subscription due to their insistence on ads at any level of support (I asked their customer service about it). Stuck with the Washington Post which seems to be okay with charging more and displaying zero ads.
- codydh 6y ago
  Was this an additional option or higher subscription? I currently have a Washington Post subscription and, with my ad blocker disabled, see plenty of ads.
  - romanows 6y ago
    Oh, sorry, this is all on the respective Android apps. On the NYT app, there were ads inserted between some paragraphs of the articles.
  - callahad 6y ago
    In the EU, there's a WaPo subscription level that explicitly touts "no on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking" as a benefit: https://imgur.com/yWPXBYe https://imgur.com/yWPXBYe
wayoutthere 6y ago
I've found their ad targeting to be laughably bad, even with 3rd party data. It's mostly ads for things that I have no interest in -- I don't give a flying fuck about golf, but saw a barrage of ads over a couple weeks for golf clubs.
tehjoker 6y ago
What's interesting to me is that in Noam Chomsky's Propaganda Model, one of the factors that make corporate media like the NYT the voice of the state and large corporations is their need for advertising dollars. If they even slightly flinch in their editorial line, the ad dollars go elsewhere, which Chomsky documented. I was about to say that the reason there's no ad free option is that advertising so dominates subscriber fees, the correct way to look at this is that they are selling audiences to other large corporations rather than in some sense serving their readers. However, their 2020 financial report shows that subscriber revenues have recently eclipsed their advertising revenue starting in 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html The subscriber revenue was about a third larger than the ad revenue then. This is kind of an interesting difference. If the advertising revenue keeps dwindling, the editorial line will become more responsive to their subscribers rather than their advertisers. Of course, the subscriber base is going to be mainly middle to upper class and college educated, and those people believe many of the same things the corporations believe. However, I would hope that this would make the NYT marginally more populist and pro-worker and less oriented towards invading other countries which they currently nearly always support uncritically. I don't think there's any hope for them going further than that, but prying the cold dead fingers of the business community off the editorial line of the nation's paper of record would open a crack in the door.
- catalogia 6y ago
  Their ad revenue might actually go up after switching to first-party ads, since those ads will probably be blocked less often than third party ads. Personally at least, 1st party ads are the only ones that ever slip through my ad blockers, and I rarely bother to block them myself.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    I think this is probably the reason they're switching to 1st party ads. The ad revenue in 2015 was still very substantial. They won't want to give that up without a fight.
dehrmann 6y ago
I have the same gripe about the FT (at least in their app).
asdff 6y ago
When I subscribed to LA times they just replaced their nonsubscriber banner ad with a 'taste of LA for subscribers only' banner ad. Didn't hesitate and just blocked the element.

ISL 6y ago

This has been true since approximately the beginning of newspaper-time. 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/2020/Final-2019-Annual-Report.pdf https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2...

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
They should be self hosting ads just like print. If they were smart 20 years ago they could have become Doubleclick.
- asdff 6y ago
  It would be unblockable too if they just had them as static images in the page. Unless you spent hours tailoring your filters and engaging in an arms race with the sysadmin, you wouldn't ever be able to win and correctly call an image an image and an ad an ad.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  When Doubleclick emerged they were essentially self hosting ads. 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.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  How do I know they aren't just proxying the request through their servers? It's third party but just transparently loaded through the same server as the rest of the content.
shadowgovt 6y ago
Unfortunately, what has been true since the beginning of newspaper time changes in the digital era, as every newspaper has learned painfully. 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.
- fma 6y ago
  They could have multiple tiers. 1) Free = 10 articles per month 2) Basic subscription = Unlimited articles, with ads 3) Premier subscription = Unlimited articles and no ads.
  - Kylekramer 6y ago
    Existence of Tier 3 reduces Tier 2's value more than money taken from Tier 3. 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.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  I find it a little funny that you're picking on NYT for that one. They were one of the first to offer digital-only subscriptions and their numbers have been climbing steadily since around 2011 when the introduced their metered paywall. https://www.statista.com/chart/3755/digital-subscribers-of-the-new-york-times/ 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.
alienreborn 6y ago
Print ads are so much better than online ads though. - Print ads generally don't break reading lines as most of them are generally between articles or between pages - Print ads don't move. 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.
blakesterz 6y ago
There was a real cost to printing single newspaper to me. I've no idea what it was, or is now, but it's about a million times more than the cost of me reading every new story on the NY Times website today. Maybe not a million times, but it's certainly much higher. 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.
- untog 6y ago
  > There was a real cost to printing single newspaper to me. There is also a higher cost to the subscriber to receive a newspaper compared to digital delivery, IIRC. So it is still proportional.
- windthrown 6y ago
  It still costs a lot of money to send reporters all over the world and do lengthy investigative journalism, regardless of if it is delivered to you in print or digital format. And NYT does charge more for physical paper delivery than they do for online-only subscriptions.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > 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 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.
romanows 6y ago
They were not interested in providing an ad-free option as of ~1 year ago, I asked.
blub 6y ago
A well-known German magazine offers an ad-free experience for 2€. Several newspapers have similar offers. So actually it's peanuts, not 50% more.
catalogia 6y ago
> This has been true since approximately the beginning of newspaper-time. This article posted yesterday about cascading collapses seems relevant: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/5/4/covid-and-cascading-collapses https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/5/4/covid-and-c... Business models that used to work well can collapse in a hurry.
monadic2 6y ago
> This has been true since approximately the beginning of newspaper-time. 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.

s_dev 6y ago

I don't understand this. I'm a paying subscriber -- I haven't seen any ads. Maybe I'm missing them: https://imgur.com/8oqmgIG https://imgur.com/8oqmgIG Can you show me? Perhaps this is an EU vs US edition thing. I'm EU.

ardy42 6y ago
Ads are definitely in the mobile app for paying US subscribers. And, no, I don't mind them. I'm very anti-ad, but financing and having access to functional journalism is more important than avoiding ads.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Arguably it's hard to have a functioning journalism if it's funded - and therefore directed and censored - by the needs of advertisers.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    Yeah, but you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Right now it's like a three-legged stool where advertising revenue is one of the legs.
  - whakim 6y ago
    At the vast majority of publications, there's intentionally no relationship between advertising-type decision-making and what the editorial staff decides to write about.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Except when they write submarine pieces, which are in fact just ads in sheep's clothing. But besides that, advertisers having no direct decision-making powers in news publishing doesn't mean journalism doesn't get corrupted by it. From the POV of the publisher, advertising can be seen as a magic button that makes them a little bit of money each time a visitor presses it. Having it as the main profit source, their primary driver now becomes ensuring as many visitors as possible press this button as frequently as possible. That's how we arrive at reputable publications serving clickbait, writing outrage-inducing noninformative articles, and embedding chumboxes in their articles. That's how the "invented pyramid" - the golden standard of news publishing that nobody cares about anymore - became dead and buried.

sammycdubs 6y ago

I honestly would be less frustrated if their ads weren't so obnoxious and ugly. Animated ads in the middle of an article are the absolute worst.

pletsch 6y ago
The opposite of this is Google-like ads where they're blended so much into the page you have to look out for them

romanows 6y ago

I canceled my subscription due to their insistence on ads at any level of support (I asked their customer service about it). Stuck with the Washington Post which seems to be okay with charging more and displaying zero ads.

codydh 6y ago
Was this an additional option or higher subscription? I currently have a Washington Post subscription and, with my ad blocker disabled, see plenty of ads.
- romanows 6y ago
  Oh, sorry, this is all on the respective Android apps. On the NYT app, there were ads inserted between some paragraphs of the articles.
- callahad 6y ago
  In the EU, there's a WaPo subscription level that explicitly touts "no on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking" as a benefit: https://imgur.com/yWPXBYe https://imgur.com/yWPXBYe

wayoutthere 6y ago

I've found their ad targeting to be laughably bad, even with 3rd party data. It's mostly ads for things that I have no interest in -- I don't give a flying fuck about golf, but saw a barrage of ads over a couple weeks for golf clubs.

tehjoker 6y ago

What's interesting to me is that in Noam Chomsky's Propaganda Model, one of the factors that make corporate media like the NYT the voice of the state and large corporations is their need for advertising dollars. If they even slightly flinch in their editorial line, the ad dollars go elsewhere, which Chomsky documented. I was about to say that the reason there's no ad free option is that advertising so dominates subscriber fees, the correct way to look at this is that they are selling audiences to other large corporations rather than in some sense serving their readers. However, their 2020 financial report shows that subscriber revenues have recently eclipsed their advertising revenue starting in 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html The subscriber revenue was about a third larger than the ad revenue then. This is kind of an interesting difference. If the advertising revenue keeps dwindling, the editorial line will become more responsive to their subscribers rather than their advertisers. Of course, the subscriber base is going to be mainly middle to upper class and college educated, and those people believe many of the same things the corporations believe. However, I would hope that this would make the NYT marginally more populist and pro-worker and less oriented towards invading other countries which they currently nearly always support uncritically. I don't think there's any hope for them going further than that, but prying the cold dead fingers of the business community off the editorial line of the nation's paper of record would open a crack in the door.

catalogia 6y ago
Their ad revenue might actually go up after switching to first-party ads, since those ads will probably be blocked less often than third party ads. Personally at least, 1st party ads are the only ones that ever slip through my ad blockers, and I rarely bother to block them myself.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  I think this is probably the reason they're switching to 1st party ads. The ad revenue in 2015 was still very substantial. They won't want to give that up without a fight.

dehrmann 6y ago

I have the same gripe about the FT (at least in their app).

asdff 6y ago

When I subscribed to LA times they just replaced their nonsubscriber banner ad with a 'taste of LA for subscribers only' banner ad. Didn't hesitate and just blocked the element.