The New York Times Has Lessons For Others Making the Slow Transition To Digital 67
mattydread23 writes "You may not think your business has much in common with the New York Times, but the newspaper is a perfect example of how to maintain investment in a large but declining legacy business while simultaneously investing in new areas that will drive future growth. Surprisingly, 10% of the paper's revenue now comes from digital subscriptions and other all-digital products (not including advertising)."
parsing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Does not apply to most papers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The NY Times overlooks the fundementals (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a lot of news sites I avoid for PRECISELY that reason.
Normally, I just want a quick read of the news. THEN, I'll consider the singing birds and the dancing flowers. That's true EVEN on a TV site. Nothing turns me off faster than a loud multimedia site that starts playing before the page is even done rendering whether I want it to or not and regardless of what those near me are doing.
The Internet is not television. There are times and places where I don't want a lot of uncontrolled noise popping out of my speakers. And there is a time when lots of pictures and stuff are important and a time when just a quick synopsis will do (at least to begin with).
NYTimes.com has been going since '96 (Score:5, Interesting)
NYT Digital (the website) was a separate but wholly-owned company from 1996 until around 2007, merging with the newspaper as the new building opened. Pageviews in the mid 2000s were half a billion per month, with approximately half that going to the homepage alone.
IIRC, annual revenues for website advertising were $150 million in the late 2000s, damned good for a newspaper site. This was before NYT jumped onto the mobile and paid-digital-subscription bandwagons, which accounts for the $37 million revs. Adverts are still king, even on the website, and that combined with the homepage being half the pageviews is why you see the most expensive placements there.
While the rest of the newspaper biz has been slow to adopt, NYTD were actively educating the old-school news staff about FB, Twitter, RSS and other common or up-and-coming technologies. They have programmers assigned to the news floor, collaborating with reporters, to build topical databases, perform big data analyses, produce dynamic reporting and graphics and so forth. NYT are doing about as well as can be expected -they're a news organization, yes, but they've converted themselves into a technology firm from the inside-out.
NYT offers developers REST APIs [nytimes.com] for fetching newsfeeds and the aforementioned databases. Semantic Web is an area of research, and they're on a level with Thomson-Reuters, and to a limited extent Bloomberg. NYT's R&D department (originally attached to the newspaper, not NYTD) produces tools for latent semantic analysis of news, comments, etc.
When Twitter hit its initial growth spurt there were many predictions it would eat the newspaper business. It hasn't, in fact the news business relies on Twitter for distributing headlines and links. 140 characters and photo links hasn't eliminated the need for in-depth writing, analysis and professional photography.
Sure, the transition to an all-digital revenue model is their Achilles Heel. Most of the rev comes from the newspaper, and the demographic average is male, 40s and makes > $70K per year. Getting the younger generations to pay for news is the challenge.
I'm a former NYTDer. I still admire what they've done to adapt. I don't know how they'll survive the next decade, honestly. It'll take a revolution in paid subscriptions to get the younger crowd as part of the paid demographic. HuffPo was being eyed as the primary competition, for awhile, as an advert-only web operation.
Too Little Too Late (Score:4, Interesting)
1/3 Subscriptions, 1/3 Advertising, 1/3 Classifieds. That was the recipe for newspaper income in the 1970s and 80s. They retrenched initially and lost the Classifieds to Ebay and Craigslist. Now they have 2 which deny each other, if they give free access they gain Advertising, but lose subscriptions, if they charge for Subscription, they may lose Advertising.
The newspapers OWNED classifieds. They totally OWNED it. They blew it to ebay and Craigslist. So the NYTimes is a great example of playing catch-up ball.