How is the New York Times doing with the new digital paywall it put up last March? We found out a few details today when the New York Times announced second quarter earnings. All together, the New York Times counts a total of 1.1 million digital subscribers, but only 281,000 of those are currently paying (756,000 are existing print subscribers who get digital access with their existing subscriptions, and another 100,000 are courtesy of a Ford Lincoln promotion).
As a result, overall circulation revenues at the company are now treading water, which is an improvement from the declining revenues last quarter. → Read More
As we reported in February, betaworks and the New York Times are collaborating to launch a socialnews reader for the iPad called News.me. And we heard more details on the app as it readied for launch this week. Today, Betaworks founder and CEO John Borthwick announced that the iPad app is finally live on the App Store for your viewing and browsing pleasure (link).
News.me, which has been in development since last August, is a social news reading iPad app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall. → Read More
The New York Times Company this morning reported Q1 2011 earnings per share of $.04, compared with $.08 in the same period of 2010.
Total revenues decreased 3.6 percent to $566.5 million from $587.9 million. The publisher’s operating profit came in at $31.1 million for the quarter, compared with $52.7 million in the same period of 2010.
Approximately three weeks after the global launch of its digital subscription packages, NYT reports paid digital subscribers have surpassed 100,000, although it cautions that it does not yet have visibility into conversion and retention rates for these paying customers after the initial promotional period. → Read More
In a move sure to irk at least two or three people who work for The New York Times, The Huffington Post (owned by AOL, our own masters in some degree of command) has put up a paywall that applies only to NYT employees.
In a message to affected potential readers of HuffPost content, founder Arianna Huffington explains that NYT employees can henceforth access only one article for free per month. → Read More
It’s not news that the New York Times payfence isn’t much of a fence. We’ve already written about the Facebook and Twitter loophole, but it turns out that the loophole is more like a loop chasm.
NYT head Martin Nisenholtz told AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka on Friday that all blog links will render stories accessible for non-subscribers. And while blog and social media referral visits will count towards the 20 free articles a month allotted, Times articles will not be blocked if a user goes over their limit and clicks on a Times link from an aggregator like Digg or Reddit or a blog like TechCrunch. Users will, however, be out of luck if they subsequently try to go to the Times’ website directly that month. → Read More
There are a lot of interesting angles to the news this morning about The New York Times’ new paywall. Top news will remain free, a set number of articles for all users will remain free, there will be different pricing tiers for different devices, NYT is fine with giving Apple a 30 percent cut, etc, etc. But to me, the most interesting aspect is only mentioned briefly about halfway down the NYT announcement article: all those who come to the New York Times via Facebook or Twitter will be allowed to read for free. There will be no limit to this.
Up until now, we’ve seen paywall enthusiasts like The Wall Street Journal offer such loopholes. But they’ve done so via Google. It’s a trick that most web-savvy news consumers know. Is a WSJ article behind a paywall? Just Google the title of it. Click on the resulting link and boom, free access to the entire thing. No questions asked. This new NYT model is taking that idea and flipping it. → Read More
Earlier today, a Business Insider report indicated that Tumblr has landed a “very big and competitive” new round of funding from Sequoia Capital. We’re still looking into that, and they’re not commenting, but here’s one thing we do know about the company: they’ve just hired a new Director of Product.
Derek Gottfrid will be joining the company from The New York Times where he was the Senior Architect in charge of many of the interesting things they do with technology. It looks like today is his last day of work for the Times, and he’ll be joining team Tumblr shortly, Tumblr President John Maloney confirms. “We’re thrilled and excited about what Derek will bring to the team/product,” Maloney writes in an email. Gottfrid had been with the Times for 12 years. → Read More
In the first quarter of the year, The New York Times Company announced upbeat earnings results, reporting a profit and growing digital advertising sales, albeit after significantly scaling down costs last year.
Earlier this morning, the media company released earnings for the second quarter, and things aren’t looking terrible for them – but not stellar either.
The company’s Q2 profit declined 18 percent to $32 million, compared to the same period a year earlier, when it recorded a $37.7 million tax benefit and net income of $39 million. On an operating basis, profit more than doubled, increasing from $23.5 million to $60.8 million. → Read More
Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.”
Yesterday, Andreessen was in New York City and we met up. We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will. → Read More
The Bay Area News Project, a non-profit media organization providing hyper local news to the San Francisco area, has announced a deal to provide news to the New York Times. The content will be used for The New York Times’ local San Francisco editions on Friday and Saturday. The deal with the New York Times has been rumored to be in negotiations but was officially announced today.
The project, which was announced last year, has received $5 million in funding from financier Warren Hellman. The site, which has a staff of nearly 30 journalists, is also supported by KQED-FM (Though it appears that deal has ended) and University of California, Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism. The Project as also brought on former McKinsey partner Lisa Frazier as CEO and Jonathan Weber, the co-founder and editor in chief of The Industry Standard, as the site’s editor in chief. → Read More
The New York Times Company announced this morning that it will be introducing a paid, metered model for NYTimes.com at the beginning of 2011.
The publisher will offer users free access to an unspecified set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number.
The New York Times says this will enable NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream while still preserving its advertising business, for which digital now makes up about a quarter of its total advertising revenues. In addition, the company says, it will also provide the “necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web”. → Read More
Well, Rupert Murdoch is going to love this. More people around the world get their news online from Google News than from CNN or the news properties of the New York Times. In November, 2009, according to comScore, Google News attracted 100 million unique visitors worldwide, making it a larger news site than CNN (66 million) or the combined properties of the New York Times (92 million). But do you know who is even larger? Yahoo News, with 138 million unique visitors worldwide. Funny how you never hear Murdoch complaining about Yahoo News.
Still, the top two sources of news online are Yahoo News and Google News, followed by the New York Times sites and CNN (China’s QQ.com News would come in fifth with 53 million visitors a month, followed by the BBC and MSN News with about 48 million each—the Wall Street Journal Online is way down the list with only 6.8 million). Google News is the orange line in the chart. → Read More
The New York Times reports today that the paper will cut 8 percent of its newsroom staff, or around 100 people by the end of 2009. Currently, the New York Times employs 1,250 staff members in the news department. The media company is planning to offer buyouts to both union and non-union staff and will need to implement layoffs if they can’t get enough people to participate in the buyout offer. The cuts have been added to the TechCruch Layoff Tracker.
The paper made cuts to its news staff in the spring of 2008, eliminating 100 jobs. The Times adds that shortly after this round of layoffs, the paper created jobs, making the reduction smaller than this year’s cut. According to the report, the Times mails buyout packages to the entire newsroom staff (yes, all 1,225 employees), and then the staff has 45 days to apply or reject the buyout. Under Newspaper Guild terms, buyouts offer participants two weeks’ salary for each year they are employed by the paper. → Read More
Apparently, the New York Times is still unsure whether its reporters should be allowed to Tweet or not. Intrigued by this tweet from writer and consultant Stowe Boyd, I registered for the New York Times’ Insight Lab, an online community / focus group made up of Times readers interested in providing the media company with direct feedback.
The homepage features a quick poll asking members if they want to see Times’ reporters and editors on Twitter or not. I guess this is the most pressing issue the New York Times wants to hear from its readers about.
For some reason, close to three quarters of the respondents indicated that they’d prefer if the journalists stay far away from the micro-sharing service. Only 7 percent had no idea what Twitter is. → Read More
One of the biggest knocks against traditional media isn’t necessarily that it’s not online — most of it is now — but rather that it’s slow when it comes to delivering news. By the time an old media site gets a story approved, written and edited, a dozen blogs probably have already covered the same news. That’s not always the case of course, and for those stories, Times Wire, a new service by The New York Times, will be very useful.
Times Wire allows you to see New York Times articles, blog posts and stories by some wire services as they are placed on the web. It automatically updates every minute, placing the latest articles at the top of a stream of content in reverse chronological order. As an overview of the entire NYT site, it’s actually quite interesting. Looking at it right now, I’ve seen five new stories pop up in the past five minutes. But for the individual sections, such as technology, it’s pretty limited. → Read More
Earlier today I covered two new URL shortening services, UnHub and LNK.by, the latest additions to the plethora of basic web applications that many people are growing accustomed to for sharing links on micro-sharing services and social networking sites.
And just when I thought I’d had it with that type of service for a while, we caught wind of one that made me raise my eyebrows. Enter NytUrl, the ‘trusted’ URL shortener for NYtimes.com articles. Update: The site and all the redirects were taken down “due to abuse.”
According to the website, the service shortens URLs for NYTimes.com articles, although a quick test shows that it’s definitely not restricted to other websites (see http://nyturl.com/34 and http://nyturl.com/35), even if it occasionally says the URL is not valid for any other site. This of course defeats the entire purpose of the service, which is to reassure people clicking the links that they’ll wind up on the NYTimes.com website. My guess is that the ability to add links to other websites will be disabled soon enough. → Read More
Being a sometimes-media critic (in years past, I wrote for the media magazine Editor & Publisher), the effects of news aggregation sites like Digg on news organizations is a topic of constant interest. Not so long ago, the vast majority of our news diet came from a single channel — reading (or listening or watching) a chosen news source. Whether it was our habit to pick up the Times every day, or to tune into 60 Minutes, whatever they decided was news, we’d learn about. In those days, the prestige and distribution of the news organization had an immense impact on the proliferation of a story. Of course, times have changed. These days, the Web has added two more news avenues to the mix: search-directed results (Google, for example), and community-driven news aggregation (Digg, most prominently, but also awful chain emails.) The spread of these channels, and Digg in particular, is having immense impact not only on our access to the news, but also on the type of reporting that news organizations undertake. And I’d venture to say that the end result could be nothing short of catastrophic. → Read More
