Saturday, August 02, 2014

Interesting observation on why the New York Times is having trouble

I found WHY THE NEW YORK TIMES IS IN TROUBLE fascinating.

It starts with:

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The New York Times appointed a task force headed by “Pinch” Sulzberger’s son to analyze the paper’s market position and recommend strategies relating particularly to its digital products. The resulting report was leaked and has gotten a lot of press attention. You can read it here. Most observers have focused on the report’s relatively negative assessment of the Times’s market position; no doubt it is galling to the Times to be surpassed by schlock outfits like the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed.

But this is what struck me: on page 23 of the report, there are charts showing the paper’s internet traffic. The Times currently gets around 6 million page views per day. That is a lot, to be sure. But Power Line averages over 200,000 page views per day. On a big news day, we may get more than 500,000. So day in and day out, the New York Times gets around 30 times the traffic that we do.

No wonder the Times has trouble finding a viable business model! We are four guys running a web site in our spare time. We have no expenses other than hosting fees of around $1,000 a month. We have no payroll and no advertising expenses. And yet the vast, expensive apparatus of the nation’s supposedly premier newspaper can muster only 30 times our traffic.
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Hat tip:  Instapundit

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