This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry.
NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever.
If NYT is the best at this and can only turn 24M a quarter, almost everyone else must be absolutely bleeding.
This would confirm most of the newspapers out there are indeed running failed business models with zero opportunity for success.
The reason this is worrisome is going forward there will be less and less ‘diversity’ in the reporting ecosystem. Instead of 50 professional reporters confirmed writing about an event, we’ll have 5.
Reality and facts will be more about picking teams than believing the consensus.
In the age of leaders publicly gaslighting, unrefereed global forums of social media which can be bought, and massive concentration of wealth at the top, fewer and consolidated reporting entities will be bad for the republic.
It's surprising to see how small they are. Only 3.8 million subscribers, and you have to imagine that some percentage of that barely reads their content.
I wonder if there's public numbers estimating how many people in total read the New York Times, and how it compares to emerging forms of media and entertainment like YouTube.
One criticism of New York Times that I've read online is that they won't allow you to cancel your digital subscription through their website. They force you to call them. I'm not sure if that has changed recently, but that's a pretty questionable dark pattern.
I canceled mine last week exactly because of those dark patterns. They also show ads even if you have a subscription, which sounds very backward to me. I'd love to support them, but those practices don't belong in 2018.
EDIT: Oh, looks like the cancellation didn't go through and they charged me for one more month, sweet. I might just go to my bank and tell them to block the source. Or even better, I may have found a trick. You can switch your payment to Paypal, and then Paypal let's you block/cancel reccuring payment. Let's see if that works.
> One criticism of New York Times that I've read online is that they won't allow you to cancel your digital subscription through their website. They force you to call them. I'm not sure if that has changed recently, but that's a pretty questionable dark pattern.
This is illegal in Europe. By law, it has to be at least as easy to cancel subscriptions, as it is to buy them.
I̶ ̶g̶u̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶b̶u̶y̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶s̶p̶a̶p̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶d̶i̶v̶i̶d̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶.̶ [edit: that number isn't for physical newspapers, see replies]
They have a print circulation of 2.1 million. [1] For comparison PewDiePie has 65 million subscribers on YouTube with his most popular video in the past couple of weeks hitting 12 million views, with an average of around 4 million.
I think this is why the media, in general and including the NYT, has become more partisan and more emotional. It's being used as a consumer retention mechanic. Impartial news done well is informative but not necessarily entertaining, which means it's probably not sustainable in the current zeitgeist of America.
> One criticism of New York Times that I've read online is that they won't allow you to cancel your digital subscription through their website. They force you to call them. I'm not sure if that has changed recently, but that's a pretty questionable dark pattern.
They let me cancel via chat a few months ago. Obviously I'd have prefered the press of a button to cancel, but even via chat it was a quick and painless affair.
Far more than 3.8 people actually read the NYT. First, because it is often handed around in families/at work, or left in a subway for the next passenger to read.
And everyone else gets to read or hear about the Time's work the next day, when every other news outlet copies their work.
Nobody appreciates the value of journalism, because we feel inundated in it. But it's only copying and distribution that are free. When you try following everything back to its original source, it's a surprisingly small number of publications doing most of the work.
The main page only gives the phone number, but in the policy they also provide an email address you can communicate with to cancel [1]. Still, that is pretty frustrating when it should just be a few clicks. I recently had to turn off cable internet, which took an hour long conversation as the only method available, whereas turning off the power to the apartment took about 30 seconds after logging into their platform.
It's also very hard to cancel even by calling. When I cancelled my subscription last year, it wasted twenty minutes of my time even though I was firm throughout. The retaining person at one point even insulted me when I didn't catch something he said and said excuse me could you say that again - his response was to start doing an exaggerated accent of what he assumes to be my race (based on the name).
As much as I like the NYT, as mentioned below, their unsubscribe functionality sucks. I sent them an email last December requesting to unsubscribe. I didn't follow up on it and eventually forgot about it.
Eventually, they email me around May to apologise that my email was "delayed" due to a technical glitch they had just discovered. Great but I still never got an actual unsubscription processed.
A few months later, around July while doing a "subscription spring cleaning", I called them up to cancel it. The guy asked why I was leaving (6 months+ with no customer support answer) and promptly processed my cancellation.
A few weeks later, I was emailed a "resubscription offer" which genuinely frustrated me as you might imagine.
Their mobile app is worse: Any article shows 7 instances of the same ad in a rather short article. So any article is basically 70% ads. This is even when you have a paid subscription. Even the NYT lost the high ground on the ad-free reading game.
> A few weeks later, I was emailed a "resubscription offer" which genuinely frustrated me as you might imagine.
If it's a single one, I don't think they're overdoing it. Resubscription offers are pretty much standard practice. I know some people who regularly cancel their cellphone contract after the minimum duration in order to get discount offers for the next contract period.
I purchased an annual digital subscription and I'm never even logged into NYT. I get my news from various sources, including NYT, but I don't go to NYT for news, it comes to me through Reddit and Apple news.
I consider the subscription more of a donation, because we are living in a time where the news media has to be supported -- we can't have it die.
I wonder if my use case resonates with other people my age.
I hate it too, it seems "off" with the rest of the internet. But on the other hand, print subscriptions have always included ads too, so not really sure what's right.
I love their 'The Daily' podcast. They pick one topic everyday and dive deep over 30 mins. Overall a happy NYT subscribed for last 6 months. I paid 110$ for 1 year membership and got a free Google home device. Great deal!
That's on my daily rotation too; but I still don't sub to NYT.
After seeing the low NYT subscriber #'s in this thread, it's amazing to me how much reach 'new media' creators have. There are hundreds of YouTubers that get more eyeballs daily. Crazy.
The NYT has been paying roughly the same amount each year for production of news for the last few years, and a steadily increasing amount of "general, sales and admin", even as their gross income from subscriptions has shot up, and their income from advertising has plummeted.[1]
I really struggle with that. That isn't how this is supposed to work. Escaping the broken advertising model and moving to a reader-funded model is supposed to give you scope to shake off overheads, to clarify your business's purpose and to slimline and focus operations to improve the quality of content at the price point. That's the mantra for the new renaissance of journalism, in which the NYT has been hailed as a massive success story.
I don't by any means mean to denigrate the NYT - they produce some excellent reporting, but it seems that from a business perspective there is something askew here. The Guardian in the UK has managed to do exactly what was expected - the proportion of their staff who are journalists has increased steadily for a decade as their revenue split has shifted towards subscription, and their finances have steadily improved (they're still not in the black, but it looks like they will be this year, for the first time since the business model fell apart). On the other side, it seems like the NYT are posting profits, but without fundamentally reshaping the business.
There is a massive backlash in this thread against dark patterns to prevent subscriber loss and continued advertising even after subscription. It feels like the company may be selling the goodwill and brand value that are the cornerstone to the reader-funded, reader-focused new age of journalism in order to get their profit margins looking healthy, despite failing to cut overheads, which is where the profit increases in this new model ought to be coming from.
I would really, deeply like to be shown to be wrong. We need sustainable, reader-funded businesses producing great journalism and I want to think the NYT is one of them.
I pay for the Economist and think it's worth every penny. Wonder how many magazines/news sites can actually get users to pay for their content though. I suspect the number is low.
There seems to be a natural opportunity for ISPs in a certain country to pay to have all their customers unblocked by major publications relevant to that public - and have a certain fraction of the customer bill disbursed depending on online circulation.
I would gladly pay 20% more to my ISP to have hassle free access to major online publications, knowing that revenue helps journalists produce quality news, and that I only pay for what I use. instead of New York Times having 3 million subscribers for 9$/a month and lose a good part of that revenue on customer acquisition and card fees, they could have 100 million subscribers at 30c each, their respective revenue share from a $5-10 ISP bill price increase. While at the same time, supporting 30 other papers the size of NYT, or thousands of smaller, local ones.
That's because the NYT online success story is a very rare bird today.
not only do they advertise to you after you pay, if you are running adblock they attempt to guilt you into disabling it.
it's especially galling because the washington post costs me $27/year and doesn't bug me to disable my adblocker, and nytimes is $12/mo plus a guilt trip about "supporting journalism".
And after seeing how bullshit their unsubscribe flow is, I don't think I'll be joining back any time soon. As much as I want to support their work, these dark patterns are despicable.
I would pay another couple dollars a month to not have ads in the app (though I am thankful that they tend to not be hugely intrusive). Overall pretty happy with the service.
I subscribed the moment they hired Susan Flower (susanthesquark). We often call for the boycott of bad actors so we should reward the good actors, I feel.
I couldn't subscribe again when they hired Sarah Jeong (sarahjeong) but if I could, I would do it again in a heartbeat.
The greatest marketing trick the NYT has ever pulled off is presenting themselves as the last bastion of objectivity in the trump era.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the most recent Sarah Jeong controversy and virtually all reporting on migration, feminism, campus politics etc shows this. Mind you this is from a European perspective where I see almost all reporting about politics here as copying off talking points from the far left.
This is the true genius of their marketing though: They are actually as polarized as any other source in the culture war, but market themselves to an audience that likes to think of themselves as rational, objective, sensible.
"Far left" is a pretty polarising way to describe them.
I'm from the UK, which is a country which is firmly on the right of most of Europe, and policy in the US is extremely far right of here. The reporting I've seen from the New York Times is barely left, let alone "far left".
The right seems to have moved so far out to the far right, and yet people act like the centre-point of the Repbulicans and Democrats is still somehow the neutral position.
You're just saying you don't like their editorial. So.. don't subscribe!
There is no trickery here.
Far left.. you really have no idea how silly you look. There is almost no institution in the USA which actively publishes a broadsheet newspaper you could call left, let alone "far" left. Middle of the road looks pretty left from a ranty right view maybe.
They aren't bridging any gaps or increasing understanding in society. They are playing the same game everyone else is playing in amplifying an us VS them narrative. Because that is what the underlying social media architecture of likes/clicks/views/upvotes produces in everyone.
There is no genius about this.
It's just their method to survive. Obv it benefits them temporarily but the costs are accruing to society.
Journalism cannot be built on top of likes/views/clicks/retweets/upvotes. Stuff that is built on top of that architecture conditions journalists and talking heads to pander.
That architecture must change. There is no sane reason for these numbers to be shown to journalists and their readers in real time.
It's like watching E.B.Skinners behaviour experiments with rats.
Changing this architecture of real time counts used as behaviour conditioners can be changed only by the tech world.
Maybe in the past the NYT had earned their reputation as a trustworthy source, but they're certainly eroding that reputation at a blistering pace. They might survive as a partisan publisher, plenty do, but I always go into NYT articles expecting bias in reporting.
> Keep in mind that the life expectancy of people before the advent of agriculture 15,000 years ago rarely reached or exceeded 40, so their risk of developing the so-called diseases of civilization is unknown.
To completely ignore how infant mortality affects life expectancy shows a complete lack of knowledge of history or statistics.
[+] [-] Dwolb|7 years ago|reply
This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry.
NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever.
If NYT is the best at this and can only turn 24M a quarter, almost everyone else must be absolutely bleeding.
This would confirm most of the newspapers out there are indeed running failed business models with zero opportunity for success.
The reason this is worrisome is going forward there will be less and less ‘diversity’ in the reporting ecosystem. Instead of 50 professional reporters confirmed writing about an event, we’ll have 5.
Reality and facts will be more about picking teams than believing the consensus.
In the age of leaders publicly gaslighting, unrefereed global forums of social media which can be bought, and massive concentration of wealth at the top, fewer and consolidated reporting entities will be bad for the republic.
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|7 years ago|reply
I wonder if there's public numbers estimating how many people in total read the New York Times, and how it compares to emerging forms of media and entertainment like YouTube.
One criticism of New York Times that I've read online is that they won't allow you to cancel your digital subscription through their website. They force you to call them. I'm not sure if that has changed recently, but that's a pretty questionable dark pattern.
[+] [-] ehsankia|7 years ago|reply
EDIT: Oh, looks like the cancellation didn't go through and they charged me for one more month, sweet. I might just go to my bank and tell them to block the source. Or even better, I may have found a trick. You can switch your payment to Paypal, and then Paypal let's you block/cancel reccuring payment. Let's see if that works.
[+] [-] undreren|7 years ago|reply
This is illegal in Europe. By law, it has to be at least as easy to cancel subscriptions, as it is to buy them.
I love Europe. :)
[+] [-] rahimnathwani|7 years ago|reply
It's a slight hassle as you need to go to a web site to get a code every 3 days, but it's probably preferable for those who don't read it every day: https://sfpl.libanswers.com/friendly.php?slug=faq/166904
[+] [-] comex|7 years ago|reply
https://www.nytco.com/year-of-audience/
I̶ ̶g̶u̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶b̶u̶y̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶s̶p̶a̶p̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶d̶i̶v̶i̶d̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶.̶ [edit: that number isn't for physical newspapers, see replies]
[+] [-] TangoTrotFox|7 years ago|reply
I think this is why the media, in general and including the NYT, has become more partisan and more emotional. It's being used as a consumer retention mechanic. Impartial news done well is informative but not necessarily entertaining, which means it's probably not sustainable in the current zeitgeist of America.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_by_circulat...
[+] [-] thirdsun|7 years ago|reply
They let me cancel via chat a few months ago. Obviously I'd have prefered the press of a button to cancel, but even via chat it was a quick and painless affair.
[+] [-] matt4077|7 years ago|reply
And everyone else gets to read or hear about the Time's work the next day, when every other news outlet copies their work.
Nobody appreciates the value of journalism, because we feel inundated in it. But it's only copying and distribution that are free. When you try following everything back to its original source, it's a surprisingly small number of publications doing most of the work.
[+] [-] chriskanan|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115015852367-Digi...
[+] [-] PakG1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cstrat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kayoone|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 628C6l0|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spondyl|7 years ago|reply
Eventually, they email me around May to apologise that my email was "delayed" due to a technical glitch they had just discovered. Great but I still never got an actual unsubscription processed.
A few months later, around July while doing a "subscription spring cleaning", I called them up to cancel it. The guy asked why I was leaving (6 months+ with no customer support answer) and promptly processed my cancellation.
A few weeks later, I was emailed a "resubscription offer" which genuinely frustrated me as you might imagine.
[+] [-] alpb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majewsky|7 years ago|reply
If it's a single one, I don't think they're overdoing it. Resubscription offers are pretty much standard practice. I know some people who regularly cancel their cellphone contract after the minimum duration in order to get discount offers for the next contract period.
[+] [-] kpennell|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenpizza13|7 years ago|reply
I consider the subscription more of a donation, because we are living in a time where the news media has to be supported -- we can't have it die.
I wonder if my use case resonates with other people my age.
[+] [-] iscrewyou|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glup|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dazc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|7 years ago|reply
I hate it too, it seems "off" with the rest of the internet. But on the other hand, print subscriptions have always included ads too, so not really sure what's right.
[+] [-] gandutraveler|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sunsetMurk|7 years ago|reply
After seeing the low NYT subscriber #'s in this thread, it's amazing to me how much reach 'new media' creators have. There are hundreds of YouTubers that get more eyeballs daily. Crazy.
[+] [-] _carl_jung|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gearhart|7 years ago|reply
I really struggle with that. That isn't how this is supposed to work. Escaping the broken advertising model and moving to a reader-funded model is supposed to give you scope to shake off overheads, to clarify your business's purpose and to slimline and focus operations to improve the quality of content at the price point. That's the mantra for the new renaissance of journalism, in which the NYT has been hailed as a massive success story.
I don't by any means mean to denigrate the NYT - they produce some excellent reporting, but it seems that from a business perspective there is something askew here. The Guardian in the UK has managed to do exactly what was expected - the proportion of their staff who are journalists has increased steadily for a decade as their revenue split has shifted towards subscription, and their finances have steadily improved (they're still not in the black, but it looks like they will be this year, for the first time since the business model fell apart). On the other side, it seems like the NYT are posting profits, but without fundamentally reshaping the business.
There is a massive backlash in this thread against dark patterns to prevent subscriber loss and continued advertising even after subscription. It feels like the company may be selling the goodwill and brand value that are the cornerstone to the reader-funded, reader-focused new age of journalism in order to get their profit margins looking healthy, despite failing to cut overheads, which is where the profit increases in this new model ought to be coming from.
I would really, deeply like to be shown to be wrong. We need sustainable, reader-funded businesses producing great journalism and I want to think the NYT is one of them.
[1] https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2... (page 55)
[+] [-] tschellenbach|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bumholio|7 years ago|reply
I would gladly pay 20% more to my ISP to have hassle free access to major online publications, knowing that revenue helps journalists produce quality news, and that I only pay for what I use. instead of New York Times having 3 million subscribers for 9$/a month and lose a good part of that revenue on customer acquisition and card fees, they could have 100 million subscribers at 30c each, their respective revenue share from a $5-10 ISP bill price increase. While at the same time, supporting 30 other papers the size of NYT, or thousands of smaller, local ones.
That's because the NYT online success story is a very rare bird today.
[+] [-] sngz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|7 years ago|reply
it's especially galling because the washington post costs me $27/year and doesn't bug me to disable my adblocker, and nytimes is $12/mo plus a guilt trip about "supporting journalism".
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
1) [massive funding campaign banner plea]
2) funds and visit wikipedia again
3) [massive funding campaign banner plea]
.. I don't know, use a cookie to make the banner smaller at least..
[+] [-] ehsankia|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taurath|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akhatri_aus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chx|7 years ago|reply
I couldn't subscribe again when they hired Sarah Jeong (sarahjeong) but if I could, I would do it again in a heartbeat.
[+] [-] ageek123|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethanwillis|7 years ago|reply
Since everyone is talking about the "racist" tweets. Maybe we should also remember how Sarah dog piled onto Naomi Wu.
[+] [-] paulcole|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrillgore|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naturalgradient|7 years ago|reply
Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the most recent Sarah Jeong controversy and virtually all reporting on migration, feminism, campus politics etc shows this. Mind you this is from a European perspective where I see almost all reporting about politics here as copying off talking points from the far left.
This is the true genius of their marketing though: They are actually as polarized as any other source in the culture war, but market themselves to an audience that likes to think of themselves as rational, objective, sensible.
[+] [-] Latty|7 years ago|reply
I'm from the UK, which is a country which is firmly on the right of most of Europe, and policy in the US is extremely far right of here. The reporting I've seen from the New York Times is barely left, let alone "far left".
The right seems to have moved so far out to the far right, and yet people act like the centre-point of the Repbulicans and Democrats is still somehow the neutral position.
[+] [-] ggm|7 years ago|reply
There is no trickery here.
Far left.. you really have no idea how silly you look. There is almost no institution in the USA which actively publishes a broadsheet newspaper you could call left, let alone "far" left. Middle of the road looks pretty left from a ranty right view maybe.
(I'm a Guardian subscriber btw)
[+] [-] jottr|7 years ago|reply
They aren't bridging any gaps or increasing understanding in society. They are playing the same game everyone else is playing in amplifying an us VS them narrative. Because that is what the underlying social media architecture of likes/clicks/views/upvotes produces in everyone.
There is no genius about this.
It's just their method to survive. Obv it benefits them temporarily but the costs are accruing to society.
Journalism cannot be built on top of likes/views/clicks/retweets/upvotes. Stuff that is built on top of that architecture conditions journalists and talking heads to pander. That architecture must change. There is no sane reason for these numbers to be shown to journalists and their readers in real time.
It's like watching E.B.Skinners behaviour experiments with rats.
Changing this architecture of real time counts used as behaviour conditioners can be changed only by the tech world.
[+] [-] ericdykstra|7 years ago|reply
It's not just the politics, either. I ran across this article from just a couple of days ago and couldn't believe it got past an editor: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/well/why-take-diet-advice...
> Keep in mind that the life expectancy of people before the advent of agriculture 15,000 years ago rarely reached or exceeded 40, so their risk of developing the so-called diseases of civilization is unknown.
To completely ignore how infant mortality affects life expectancy shows a complete lack of knowledge of history or statistics.
[+] [-] kyleblarson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|7 years ago|reply