They've got somewhere north of 3 million online subscribers paying $17/month. It's not Netflix numbers, but it's still more than $600M/year - about a third of t

They've got somewhere north of 3 million online subscribers paying $17/month. It's not Netflix numbers, but it's still more than $600M/year - about a third of their claimed revenue. Their writers are salaried at $110K/year on average and probably around 1300 writers (given data from 2016), so that's about half their digital income for salaries. There's also the economies of price here that's often neglected - if they charged less, more people could and would pay for it. At $17/month they can forget it, I'll get my news elsewhere. At $9.99/month, it becomes a consideration for me. At <$5/month, I'm almost definitely in; I give $4/month to Nintendo so I can play Animal Crossing with a few friends a couple times a month. I'd normally happily spend $5-10/month at a Starbucks on a mocha as an occasional treat (you know, if it weren't for the whole pandemic thing). What I'm sure is really burning their income are holdovers from a bygone era - printing presses and their maintenance, prestigious billion dollar buildings in downtown New York City, and so on. There's no way the print side of the business is paying for itself anymore at the volume they're printing at... it's just time to let it go. And writers can work from literally anywhere... A curiously common refrain often heard here from tech workers.