The Weekly Beast: Doing the Math

The Daily Beast loses something like $200,000 a week. Newsweek loses around $500,000 a week. (Actually more like $538,000—that's $28 million a year.) Put the two entities together and you're losing a million dollars every ten days or so. Sure, there's some cash incoming—Newsweek has $165 million in annual revenue! Which is a ton of money… almost none of which comes from Newsweek.com. Making sense of the properties online is the most confusing order of the merger. (What will be done to the print product seems pretty obvious to most.) Particularly given that Newsweek.com has two to three times the traffic of the Beast. Here's the case for not shutting down Newsweek.com, which includes "not throwing away $9 million a year," because, you know, who doesn't like $9 million a year? Why, that pays for like 90 days of burn rate! After all, Newsweek.com only loses $38,000. Each week. Seems like almost nothing in all those other numbers, right? In any event, now the firings begin.

[Relevant disclosures: I have taken money from the Daily Beast and enjoyed it. I like Tina Brown. I have never read an issue of Newsweek, not even at the dentist.]