'NYT' Second Quarter: Ad Revenue Down 30% Over Last Year
Well. Today's New York Times announcement of 2nd quarter revenues had some weirdness! For one thing, CEO Janet Robinson & friends trumpet their 1.5% climb in circulation income, because of their raised price. Um, they raised the price three times in the last two years, including in May, the middle of this second quarter, and that last was a 33% price increase to the weekday paper. I do not believe that this 1.5% increase in newsstand and subscriber income "shows the value our newspapers provide day in, day out to our readers." I think it shows that the price raise barely offset the loss of a lot of subscribers and newsstand sales.
The Times itself is leading with this: "The New York Times Company on Thursday reported second-quarter net income of $39.1 million, up from $21.1 million in the period a year earlier."
And yet if I were going over their release to write a news story? I might lead with: "Total revenues decreased 21.2 percent to $584.5 million from $741.9 million primarily due to lower print and online advertising."
But here is the most interesting part: a not inconsiderable web income downturn, couple with a simultaneous growth in share of the web as income provider. Hello, future!
Total Internet revenues decreased 14.3 percent to $78.2 million from $91.3 million, and Internet advertising revenues declined 15.5 percent to $68.0 million from $80.5 million…. In total, Internet businesses accounted for 13.4 percent of the Company's revenues in the second quarter versus 12.3 percent in the 2008 second quarter.
I love that Janet's solution is to write a series of stories on her new puppy! Everybody loves puppies!
Ha! Well that's Jill, the editorial #2. But it made the top of the Most Emailed List! Yes! "MY NEW PUPPY!" Score!
I am going to adopt some rats and write a weekly column about them for the traffic.
Forget writing. Just cat cam!
http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/cc_index_en.htm
The greatest irony is that thanks to your great summary, the Times internet business won't even financially benefit from my click through to read about how their internet business is in the toilet. so meta.
Shouldn't someone by now have just handed off the whole damn thing to Goldman Sachs???
If I can bring this down to curb level, it now costs six bucks for a non-subscribing outlander like me to buy the Sunday Times at the local 7 Eleven.
The clerk there isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer; in fact, she's not even in the drawer. But, she's said to me, the past two weeks, in precisely the same meter and inflection, "You spend six bucks on that thing?"
That is not an exclusively outland sentiment.