New York Times: 100,000 PayWall Payers

Image by Laughing Squid via FlickrThe New York Times did not get me, but looks like it got 100,000 people and counting. When they erected the paywall I think they had an inkling as to this number. But the numbers are still not adding up for me.

Let's crunch. 100,000 people paying $20 each is two million. Is that per year? Per month? If it is per year, the paywall is a fail whale. If it is per month, the paywall might still be a fail whale, although a smaller one. 20 million can't keep the New York Times afloat.

And while we are at it, I'd like to know how much traffic has been lost in the mean time.

New York Times Paywall Sucks (2)
New York Times Paywall Sucks
New York Times: A Dog's Got To Eat

If you don't want to pay right now the formula is look for the article on Twitter. It is very unlikely someone has not tweeted it out already. Supposedly when you click on a New York Times article over from Twitter, that article is free. And the experience is adventurous. That is a good reason to not pay.

GigaOm: The NYT: Portrait of an Old Media Giant in Transition: a traditional media giant that is trying desperately to move into the digital future, but keeps getting dragged back down by the weight of its declining legacy businesses ..... The paper’s newly launched “metered access” pay plan has brought in 100,000 subscribers, and its online advertising revenue rose. But that was more than offset by a sharp drop in profits and a continuing decline in ad revenue. For the NYT, it seems to be one step forward and two steps backwards. ...... about 100,000 people have signed up as a result of its subscription plan (although visitors and pageviews have fallen ...... $20 million in annual revenue ..... making $20 million in a year from its subscription plan is a drop in the financial bucket: the company’s operating costs for its News Media Group, which includes the New York Times and the Boston Globe, were $500 million for the first quarter alone ...... Even if the subscription plan hits its goal of 300,000 subscribers, it will only generate about $60 million in revenue, which is barely enough to move the needle for a company of the NYT’s size — and that’s not including the cost of implementing the wall in the first place. ...... profit for the quarter fell by more than 50 percent, and operating profit was down by almost 30 percent. Advertising revenue fell by more than 4 percent compared with the previous year, circulation revenues fell by almost 4 percent as well, and newsprint expenses climbed by almost 13 percent. Digital advertising rose by 4.5 percent, but didn’t even come close to making up for the 7.5 percent decline in print advertising, which still accounts for about 70 percent of the company’s overall ad revenue. ....... the Christian Science Monitor couldn’t accomplish its transformation without shutting down its daily newspaper and focusing exclusively online.

My prescription for the New York Times from 2009 still stands.

New York Times, Don't Die, Live

Go completely digital. Go multimedia. Go hyperlocal and global. Sell your own ads.

Related articles

• New York Times: More Than 100K Digital Subs In First Weeks of Paywall (paidcontent.org)
• NYT Gets 100,000 Paid Digital Subscriptions in First Three Weeks of Paywall (techland.time.com)
• The Ethicist: The Pay Wall's the Thing (nytimes.com)
• New York Times traffic drops behind pay wall (troyrecord.com)
• New York Times Paywall: Where Are We Headed? (comm334spring2011.wordpress.com)
• Reverse Pay Wall from Digg? April Fool! (socialtimes.com)
• NYT Profits Plunge As Revs Slip; Digital Dollars Up Modestly (paidcontent.org)
• Running the NYT paywall has higher cost than you might expect (shortformblog.tumblr.com)
• A Month In, New York Times Paywall has 100K Subscribers (readwriteweb.com)
• The New York Times "pay wall" | Gene Expression (blogs.discovermagazine.com)