The New York Times Co owns 10% of the Red Sox and all of the Boston Globe. Since tomorrow is opening day, let’s look at one of the team’s minority owners’ recent struggles.
Let me get this straight. A newspaper’s print circulation goes down from 1.2 million in 1993 to about 1.1 million a day over 15 years but at the same time increases it’s audience 50-fold online and it’s worth less money? Huh?
Reading Eric Alterman’s New Yorker story on the death of US newspapers—it’s all gloom and doom, end of this and that. But then I found these figures:
Maybe this is a well known fact, but I am not sure people realize how big The New York Times has become.
The New York Times is the leading global news brand with an audience of 74 million unique visitors a month. That compares to a circulation of the paper edition of 1.1 million daily and 1.6 million on Sundays.
Online, the NY Times gets 50 times the audience that it gets in paper form. Wow. Yahoo News is next with 67 million unique visitors a month, but they are aggregating news. Next is The Weather Channel with 44 million unique visitors per month.
I’m confused. How is a company that loses 10% of it’s print audience but gains 500% online a loser? Oh, wait, the people who keep hammering on this work on Wall St. You know, those same folks who ruined our economy. Wall St hate newspapers. Because newspapers’ websites can’t figure out how to make money, there’s no short term gain. Deutsche Bank—an awesome company who banked with our boy Herr Hitler—says sell your NYT stock. But looking at the numbers above, it seems newspapers should recover profitability in the near future. Here’s one example how…
Each week, online news sites try out new ways to attract people. Yes, there is information diffusion via independent blogs and the like, but consider a breaking story like Spitzer-gate. Every person in an office in America—or the people with all of America’s $$$—clicked on NYT.com two Mondays ago at 2:00pm. That had to worth some money, having America’s entire white collar class look at your site, right?
Some context: When Lohan was up on NYMAG.com nude, Portfolio estimated it was worth $1 million, had they harnessed the advertising potential. A low-end estimate of Spitzter-gate would be, say, $3 million, or the annual cost of the Times’ Baghdad bureau. Soon enough, websites will figure out how to maximize ad revenue on a breaking story.
It’s too early in the digital era to say newspapers are dead. WhoreGate was the Times’ first mega-scoop of the digital age. All this profit-related Wall St pressure must be ignored until newspapers figure out what their content is actually worth in the webosphere.
TAGS: Boston, economy, Hitler, New York, New York Times, Red Sox
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