4 ms·

I'm reposting my comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459211 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459211) from the previous submission on this topic :htt

by mlinsey 18y ago

I'm reposting my comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459211 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459211) from the previous submission on this topic :http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459017 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459017 Note that this article compares the costs of printing all copies of the New York Times to sending only subscribers free Kindles. I started this post expecting to explain how this made the NYT's printing costs sound a bit more reasonable. Then I found that according to Wikipedia, which cites a 2007 release by the paper itself, the daily circulation of the New York Times is 1,000,665 Daily and 1,438,585 on Sundays. I am honestly quite surprised that the number of papers sold at newsstands and vending machines is therefore under 200K on weekdays. Using these figures and building off of SAI's estimates, the cost of printing copies just for subscribers is probably about $503 million, or still enough for just under 1.7 kindles per subscriber. Note also that neither bandwidth costs nor the costs of delivering papers is counted. I presume factoring this in would make the print newspaper look even worse. As a reply, Kaizyn pointed out that people are more likely to share copies of the paper NYT than their Kindle. I think that's a good point, but I'm not sure how to account for it at all.

Herring 18y ago
1.7 kindles per subscriber per year, you mean. It's probably cleaner to work out how long it would take to recoup that 'investment' assuming subscriber readership & ad revenue don't change. He also assumes wages outside the newsroom are all in printing, which makes no sense. The article says 2 kindles over a year's costs, so his t=0.5 yr. If cutting out 4/5 of the dead tree edition doesn't do much outside raw materials, t=6yrs, which is crazy. Thing is it's all irrelevant. The assumptions & lack of information make the calculations useless. We already knew t>0, that's not a surprise.

by mlinsey 18y ago

Herring 18y ago

1.7 kindles per subscriber per year, you mean. It's probably cleaner to work out how long it would take to recoup that 'investment' assuming subscriber readership & ad revenue don't change. He also assumes wages outside the newsroom are all in printing, which makes no sense. The article says 2 kindles over a year's costs, so his t=0.5 yr. If cutting out 4/5 of the dead tree edition doesn't do much outside raw materials, t=6yrs, which is crazy. Thing is it's all irrelevant. The assumptions & lack of information make the calculations useless. We already knew t>0, that's not a surprise.