Newsonomics: 10 Numbers on The New York Times’ 1 million Digital-Subscriber Milestone

Newsonomics reporting:

...4. The Times can count about the same number of payingdaily readers today as it could in 1995.

In those pre-digital days, the Times’ daily circulation stood at 1.5 million. Today, it counts 625,000 daily print payers (home delivery and single copy) and those 1 million digital payers. That’s a little over 1.6 million. That’s another mind-boggling equivalency. With all that has changed, in the news business particularly, roughly the same number of people pay for The New York Times. One takeaway: Even at the peak of financial success — and the ’90s were good for the industry — the Times still relied on only a tiny percentage of Americans. At one point, a million and a half paying readers meant sustaining prosperity. Now, it seems like a shaky lifeline. There’s truth and there’s perception, and a lot to think about..

9. Newsroom investment is a business driver.

Of the Times’ total expense budget, about 20 percent goes to the newsroom. That’s about one-third more than the average U.S. daily, which spends 12.5 percent — or one out of eight dollars — on content creation. It’s no accident that the two regional leaders in digital-only sales, The Boston Globe (with 63,000 digital-only subscribers) and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis (with 58,000 digital-onlies), both spend closer to 20 percent as well. Readers know quality, depth, and breadth when they see it, and they’re willing to pay for it. There’s a lesson in that for the industry.

The NYTimes could be worth $19bn instead of $2bn

Monday Note reporting:

Recent annual reports and estimates for the calendar year 2014 suggest interesting comparisons between the financial performance of media (either legacy or digital) and Internet giants.

In the charts below, I look at seven companies, each in a class by itself:

Coming back to our analysis, Google unsurprisingly crushes all competitors when it comes its financial performance against its audience (counted in monthly unique visitors):

http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/02/15/the-nytimes-could-be-worth-19bn-instead-of-2bn/

The Unmanageables

Vanity Fair reporting:
When a crusading but conflict-averse billionaire bankrolls several of journalism’s most prominent mavericks to create a hard-nosed investigative news organization, it’s a recipe for turmoil. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s differences with First Look Media staff have been all over the press. Two top hires are out the door. Sarah Ellison asks whether First Look Media can make headlines that aren’t about itself.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2015/01/first-look-media-pierre-omidyar

Can Silicon Valley disrupt journalism if journalists hate being disrupted?

theguardian reporting:
Over the weekend, an open letter by some of the outgoing writers and editors of the New Republic appeared on the Facebook page of Robert Reich, the former labor secretary turned professional pundit, following a mass resignation of staff and unpaid “contributing editors” from the magazine. The letter, which lamented that “The promise of American life has been dealt a lamentable blow” with the resignation of editor Franklin Foer and literary critic Leon Wieseltier over plans to replace the former, also railed against what the authors described as “liberalism’s central journal” being “scuttled with flagrant and frivolous abandon” – a reference to internal changes being introduced by the 100-year old title’s owner Chris Hughes, a 31-year-old co-founder of Facebook.
The irony of the New Republic’s retreating elite posting their displeasure on Facebook was heightened by Hughes publishing a defense of his plans for the magazine – plans which recently-appointed chief executive Guy Vidra described as changing the publication into a “vertically integrated digital product”, whatever that means – through that most traditional of outlets: the Washington Post. To see the changes at TNR as part of the ongoing battle between Silicon Valley and traditional journalism, Hughes wrote, “dangerously oversimplifies a debate many journalistic institutions are having today”.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/09/silicon-valley-journalism-chris-hughes-new-republic-buzzfeed

Meet Beacon, The 'Netflix For News'

Forbes reporting:
Would you pay $5 a month to support your favorite writer? What if doing so gave you access not only to that writer’s articles, but also to a large and growing body of exclusive work from like-minded journalists?
That’s the idea behind Beacon, a new startup that catchily describes itself as a sort of “Netflix NFLX +0.55% for news.”
Beacon was conceived in response to a problem and an opportunity, says Dan Fletcher, one of the company’s three co-founders. The problem is that an unbundled digital news environment encourages production of clickable journalism: celebrity reporting, buzzy scoops, cute animal slideshows and so on. 

“When the pageview model is the only model that supports journalism, that incentivizes certain things,” he says. “There are just stories that freelancers can’t sell, and it’s not because they’re bad stories.”
On the other hand, social media has made it possible for journalists to market their work directly to readers in a way they never could before. That’s the opportunity.
“Social media’s made it so that writers have stepped out from behind the byline,” Fletcher says. “They have their own personal brands. But no one’s really come up with a clever way to tap that in a way that makes them some money.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/09/17/meet-beacon-the-netflix-for-news/

A Year Behind The ‘Wall’, The Times Has 101,036 Digital Subscribers

paidcontent reporting:

One year after it introduced digital charges, News Corp.‘s Times Newspapers in the UK says it has 101,036 digital subscribers across the web, tablets and e-readers.
Since the £2 weekly subscription subscription is billed as £8.66 per month, this would seem to give the publisher £874,971 in monthly paid digital revenue.

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In fact, it could be more than that, since subscriptions originated on iPad cost more, £9.99. A small proportion of the subscribers are actually Groupon users who recently took out a discounted three-month subscription, which knocks down the total revenue slightly for the time being.
The publisher is especially keen on tablets. “The Times is downloaded onto an average of 35,000 iPads every day, an increase of 40% in the 4 months since February,” its announcement says. “The average for The Sunday Times is 31,000, an increase of 41%.”
One year on, some industry chatter points to an acknowledgment that, on the web, The Times put too much behind the wall and might have been better off with a piecemeal paid strategy.
The total digital subscriptions number is up from 50,000 in November 2010 and 79,000 this March.
http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-a-year-behind-the-wall-the-times-has-101036-digital-subscribers

"Engagement is the unit of monetization"

From report What we know of digital journalism by Bill Grueskin et al.

Shanahan points to a website for a 90,000-circulation newspaper that serves a medium-sized city on the East Coast. (The name of the company is confidential because it’s a client.) This site gets around 450,000 unique visitors a month.
But those visitors differ widely, and Shanahan separates them into four types: The most loyal are the “fans,” who visit at least twice a week. Then there are the “regulars,” good for one or two visits a week. Sliding down the loyalty scale are “occasionals,” who stop by two or three times a month; and finally, the “fly-bys,” who come just once a month.
The most loyal visitors are a very small part of the overall audience: Fans make up just about 4 percent of the total number of visitors, and regulars 3 percent. Occasionals account for 17 percent and fly-bys for more than 75 percent of the total. In other words, more than three-fourths of the people who visit this news site do so just once a month.
Then Shanahan went deeper, to see how the different kinds of users behaved on the site. He knew the most loyal fans would generate more page views than the fly-bys, since fans visit the site more often. But the disparities in usage were far greater than one might expect.
Fans, despite their small numbers, were responsible for more than 55 percent of the site’s traffic. Fly-bys—those people most likely to come from a search engine or a blog—clicked on barely three pages a month. Overall, each fan generated about fifty times more traffic per person than a fly-by.
“When people talk about the size of an audience, that’s a sham,” Shanahan says. In his view, stated numbers don’t reflect how differently the varieties of users act in the way they navigate a site. Publishers mistakenly focus on “page views rather than length of time,” he writes on his blog, Digital Equilibrium. Referring to ad “impressions,” which are views (not clicks) of ads, Shanahan adds, “Using today’s standard, there is no difference between impressions that last one second, ten seconds, or two minutes.”
“The digital world has changed the revenue dynamics for publishers,” he adds in another post. “In the print world, a publisher’s shipment of physical media was the basis for generating revenue. In the digital world, consumption of media is the basis for revenue…. In other words, engagement is the unit of monetization.”
http://www.cjr.org/the_business_of_digital_journalism/chapter_two_traffic_patterns.php?page=2

Google Wallet Lets You Pay With Your Smartphone Credit cards could be a thing of the past

 Adweek reporting:
Thanks to the Google’s latest venture, you’ll never have to worry about forgetting your wallet again. Today, Google announced that it has partnered with Citi, MasterCard, First Data, and Sprint to launch Google Wallet, an app that uses near field communication to allow users to pay for purchases with a wave (or tap) of their smartphone.

At first, Google Wallet will only be compatible with Sprint’s Nexus 4G S phone, but Google plans to expand to support other devices. Users will be able to store their credit cards (which, for now, includes Citi MasterCard and the Google Prepaid Card), loyalty cards, Google Offers, coupons, and gift cards in the app. When making purchases, the app will automatically redeem offers and earn loyalty points. Google plans to make sure that users’ information will be kept secure, with a phone lock, required PIN, and credit card data encryption.

Google Wallet will work wherever MasterCard PayPass is accepted—which includes 300,000 merchants worldwide and 120,000 in the U.S. (although it’s not rolling out everywhere just yet, notes TechCrunch). Retailers including Macy’s, CVS, and Radio Shack have already signed up, and the app will be free to merchants. Google won’t take any revenue from the credit card transactions, and is planning to make money from advertising instead.

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/google-wallet-lets-you-pay-your-smartphone-132035