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I've worked with NYT.com on some of their pre-paywall strategies and have several friends who work there currently. All these points aside, the only significan

I've worked with NYT.com on some of their pre-paywall strategies and have several friends who work there currently. All these points aside, the only significant issue is that Newspapers we're propped up on an ad-based bubble that was based on keeping ad-buyers in the dark. Real-time analytics proved that advertising was not as effective as it was sold to be, ad-buyers only had (relative to todays) made up metrics that inflated the value. Now when ad-buyers can see the true value of advertising through real metrics, they are far less willing to pay top dollar for it. Rupert Murdock foresaw this very clearly when he told the founders of Google "... you're going to ruin this for everyone" in reference to allowing ad-buyers to see metrics and bid on performance. To make a very broad conclusion, marketing divisions were allowed larger budgets when they could tell executives they 'took out full page add in the New York Times' vs far less dramatic and less visible campaigns with targeted online markets, conversions, and engagement ratios. The market become less useful when the total audience of an ad turned out to be far less than 100% of the distribution.

w1ntermute 14y ago
That's a very grave statement. You're essentially saying that the entire newspaper industry has been propped up on the basis of misinformation regarding the effectiveness of advertising. While this was a lucky flaw that allowed the Fourth Estate to remain afloat, it doesn't look like it'll last much longer. We're really going to be fucked as a society if the journalism industry falls apart.
- podperson 14y ago
  Perhaps it's more of a transition. In the old world we had centralized media -- paper is expensive, printing presses are more expensive, typeset articles more expensive still, then there's distribution, etc. -- so we need to optimizes the quality of the material that gets printed and distributed. Today you can set up a wordpress or blogspot account for free. So the question is how do we get from a world of edited news written by professional journalists to a new world where a lot of the content is provided more-or-less for free, but we still need reliable places to go for news? We have parasitic sites like Huffpost and Business Insider which essentially SEO content created by professional news organizations -- what we need is something that assembles equivalent stuff from citizen journalists, bloggers, and so on.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    > a new world where a lot of the content is provided more-or-less for free, but we still need reliable places to go for news That's a wonderful sentiment, one that I'd love to see come true. But until someone can make it happen, we must consider the possibility that it cannot happen. I mean, just take a look at The Verge. They have an enormous amount of accurate and in-depth tech coverage, both text- and video-based. They are far and away better than just random bloggers posting gadget reviews - they have actual lawyers explaining the Samsung v. Apple trial, and they create wonderful video features[0] on niche communities that we'd never know about otherwise. Even though their articles and videos are plastered with ads, I just don't understand how they can become profitable, even in the long run. In any case, they had to hire the best of the best in the online tech journalism industry to build the site they have today. 0: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3177438/cyborg-america-biohackers-grinders-body-hackers http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3177438/cyborg-america-bioh...
    - podperson 14y ago
      I think that we're heading in that direction whether we like it or not. The classic newspaper is in essence a "middleman" between writers and readers who makes money by picking writers who will be popular and selling ad space. Whether or not there are publishers or an audience, there will always be writers -- it's the middleman who is being rendered unnecessary. We're seeing the same phenomena in the music industry and television, and it happened in radio long ago (which is why most radio content is completely disposable, public radio being the exception). What does the end-game look like? Probably something like Google News or the App Store. It's possible that entities such as the New Yorker or the NY Times or The Economist can survive if they figure out how to switch from their middleman model to a "make good stuff and sell it to people" model, but it's problematic -- switching business models is very hard.
csense 14y ago
Now that ad buyers can actually tell what they're buying, and margins for ad sellers are going down, it's obvious that either the quality of the content has to go down, or the price people pay has to go up. As well as the now-available statistics which affect the demand side, you also have to consider the massive increases in the supply of ad views due to the way the Internet's changing our lifestyles. I.e. NYT ads may have been much more influential in the past, when newspapers were basically the only way to get up-to-date information and commentary in printed form, but that influence has declined as newspapers now make up a much smaller part of our information diet.

w1ntermute 14y ago

That's a very grave statement. You're essentially saying that the entire newspaper industry has been propped up on the basis of misinformation regarding the effectiveness of advertising. While this was a lucky flaw that allowed the Fourth Estate to remain afloat, it doesn't look like it'll last much longer. We're really going to be fucked as a society if the journalism industry falls apart.

podperson 14y ago
Perhaps it's more of a transition. In the old world we had centralized media -- paper is expensive, printing presses are more expensive, typeset articles more expensive still, then there's distribution, etc. -- so we need to optimizes the quality of the material that gets printed and distributed. Today you can set up a wordpress or blogspot account for free. So the question is how do we get from a world of edited news written by professional journalists to a new world where a lot of the content is provided more-or-less for free, but we still need reliable places to go for news? We have parasitic sites like Huffpost and Business Insider which essentially SEO content created by professional news organizations -- what we need is something that assembles equivalent stuff from citizen journalists, bloggers, and so on.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > a new world where a lot of the content is provided more-or-less for free, but we still need reliable places to go for news That's a wonderful sentiment, one that I'd love to see come true. But until someone can make it happen, we must consider the possibility that it cannot happen. I mean, just take a look at The Verge. They have an enormous amount of accurate and in-depth tech coverage, both text- and video-based. They are far and away better than just random bloggers posting gadget reviews - they have actual lawyers explaining the Samsung v. Apple trial, and they create wonderful video features[0] on niche communities that we'd never know about otherwise. Even though their articles and videos are plastered with ads, I just don't understand how they can become profitable, even in the long run. In any case, they had to hire the best of the best in the online tech journalism industry to build the site they have today. 0: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3177438/cyborg-america-biohackers-grinders-body-hackers http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3177438/cyborg-america-bioh...
  - podperson 14y ago
    I think that we're heading in that direction whether we like it or not. The classic newspaper is in essence a "middleman" between writers and readers who makes money by picking writers who will be popular and selling ad space. Whether or not there are publishers or an audience, there will always be writers -- it's the middleman who is being rendered unnecessary. We're seeing the same phenomena in the music industry and television, and it happened in radio long ago (which is why most radio content is completely disposable, public radio being the exception). What does the end-game look like? Probably something like Google News or the App Store. It's possible that entities such as the New Yorker or the NY Times or The Economist can survive if they figure out how to switch from their middleman model to a "make good stuff and sell it to people" model, but it's problematic -- switching business models is very hard.

csense 14y ago

Now that ad buyers can actually tell what they're buying, and margins for ad sellers are going down, it's obvious that either the quality of the content has to go down, or the price people pay has to go up. As well as the now-available statistics which affect the demand side, you also have to consider the massive increases in the supply of ad views due to the way the Internet's changing our lifestyles. I.e. NYT ads may have been much more influential in the past, when newspapers were basically the only way to get up-to-date information and commentary in printed form, but that influence has declined as newspapers now make up a much smaller part of our information diet.