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A small town has, say, 50000 residents. If half of them visit the local newspaper daily and read ten pages, there's 250K daily page views, roughly 90M annual i
by umeshunni 6y ago
A small town has, say, 50000 residents.
If half of them visit the local newspaper daily and read ten pages, there's 250K daily page views, roughly 90M annual impressions.
At $1 CPM, that's $90K in annual revenue.
At $7 CPM (what the NYTimes claimed 10 years ago), that's $630K revenue.
With that, they could probably afford a staff of 2-5, depending on the town and cost of living.
If they're in a town of 5000 people, it's unlikely that they will make enough money to survive.
- tomdell 6y ago76% of incorporated places in the US have a population of less than 5000. I’m not sure a 50k+ place can be referred to accurately as a small town - where I’m from, cities with populations that large have managed to maintain their local papers anyway, unlike the smaller towns.
- in_cahoots 6y agoA small town doesn't generate 10+ pages of news a day. And considering something like 25% of the people are under 18, I doubt that most adults are going to read the local newspaper every day. 10 pages per week sounds like a more reasonable estimate.
- umeshunni 6y agoTaking both of the replies below into consideration, we end up with ~3M yearly impressions, or $3K-$21K in revenue. No one is going to survive with that. Perhaps the right model is to aggregate to the county level. I mean, does a town of 5000 actually generate enough 'news' to support a reporter? I live in a town (suburb) of 80K people and our local paper's twitter has ~6000 followers and seems to tweet about 3-4 times a day.