NYTimes.com daily uniques down ~40% since paywall implementation

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=nytimes.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

by yakto • 15 years ago

39 30 15 years ago

trends.google.com

yakto3• 15 years ago

Interestingly, Google should still be counting those who click through to a NYTimes article, hit the paywall, and bounce. So the 40% drop is the result of 1) users not clicking NYTimes links anymore, or 2) fewer NYTimes links being presented to users, perhaps due to a drop in SERPs.

I'm a datapoint of only one, but #1 above certainly applies in my case. I find myself much less likely to click through, especially on my mobile device, because I'm annoyed when I find myself above the monthly free limit. After hitting the limit a couple of months, I just stop clicking thru in the first place.

rhizome• 15 years ago

That has always been the biggest question for me: how many don't? There are bounces from content, and there are bounces from commercial barriers: paywalls, subscription modals, "give us your email please" modals (really, blocking modals of all kinds), "install our android app (or continue to site)"...I doubt any site is passing out their failure rates for these business decisions.

AlexBlom• 15 years ago

Uniques are down, but I'm wondering how much subscriptions have gone up (if at all)?

I'm also wondering how many of those 'dropped' uniques are scrapers, quick bounces, etc?

ghshephard2• 15 years ago

Has the NYTimes.com paywall really influenced someone who read the website previously? When I'm browsing from chrome, I justly click Cmd+Shift+N prior to going there (launches incognito mode in chrome with a fresh set of cookies.)

When I'm browsing from my iPhone, I just click the little "x" at the top of the screen to stop the javascript from loading after the content has been downloaded - basically stops my iPhone from loading the paywall code, but loads all the content.

I always thought the paywall was really just to prevent the print subscribers from canceling their print subscription and switching over to web only - it convinces them they are getting value with their subscription. The Paywall itself was left deliberately leaky for people who only connected to it via the web.

But, based on the stats, it looks like there may be a large audience of casual subscribes that have been deterred from visiting the website - I'm sure that must be troubling for the NYT.

yakto3• 15 years ago

> When I'm browsing from my iPhone, I just click the little "x" at the top of the screen

Thanks for that tip! I cleared all my cookies once to get around it, but what a PIA to re-login to all my authenticated sites.

mrkurt3• 15 years ago

You're not really representative of the majority of NYT readers. A minuscule number of them even understand what private browsing mode does, and even fewer realize how it interacts with the NYT paywall.

The paywall is price discrimination. A certain number of users are willing to pay for the NYT site, it's a way to let them do so.

hvass• 15 years ago

And even fewer know the keyboard shortcut.

27182818284• 15 years ago

It affected my reading habits, just not on my laptop. When the paywall was first released, I suspected it wouldn't change anything for me, but I found myself hitting the limit quite a bit on my phone.

18pfsmt• 15 years ago

The interesting numbers will come out in 11 days (i.e. 7/21 in the am) when they report earnings. Perhaps the traffic they've retained will be perceivably more valuable to their advertisers, and the decreased server load has allowed them to cut costs? For posterity, current financials: $8.98/share, Mkt Cap $1.23B, EPS $0.66, P/E 13.61. I'm curious enough that I'll probably listen to the earnings call.

EDIT: Sunday math; and should add shares: 147.18M.

minimax3• 15 years ago

At $3.75/week it was less hassle for me just to pay up. Strangely I also noticed that I actually read a few more articles per week now that I'm paying for it. It's a great paper. I don't understand the aversion to spending a little bit of money to get a bunch of good content.

On a side note, the Android app used to be horribly buggy but a recent update seems to have fixed the issues. Anyone who was turned off before may want to give it another shot.

thematt• 15 years ago

I think the aversion is that with the growth of the internet, news is becoming (or already has) commoditized. People look at the articles in the NYT and they don't see original journalistic content, they see something they can get from 50 other sites thru Google News. If the NYT wants to survive, they need to get back to their journalistic roots and increase the value proposition to potential customers...it has to be more than just "it's less of an inconvenience to just pay us."

ghshephard2• 15 years ago

I love the NYT, totally agree with you. I just couldn't deal with the $240/year price to read it on my iPad and Browser, so I subscribed to the WSJ instead @$100/year.

Also, and I don't know if they ever fixed it, the NYT wouldn't include their business graphics/charts on their iPad edition. Very Lame. WSJ is good about including all their content on their (in my opinion) much more elegant iPad App.

xbryanx• 15 years ago

I am guessing that they knew their traffic would decrease. What we probably won't know for a while is whether the decreased ad revenue, as a result of fewer impressions, is greater than the increased subscription revenue. Assuming subscriptions have increased.

mrkurt3• 15 years ago

Keep in mind that most ad funded sites on the internet have excess unique/impression inventory, even 40% excess at times. So there are three numbers to consider here:

1) Increased subscription revenue

2) Sold inventory they've lost

3) Effect on pricing of remaining inventory

Oddly enough, a site like the NYT might be able to make more money off ads with less impressions (#3 up there). There are two reasons for this, the first is their brand value. People want their ads on NYT, scarcer supply means they'll have to pay more to do that, and some of them will.

The second is a change in demographics. I would guess that the lost traffic is disproportionately less valuable demographics. I, for instance, am not a great demographic for advertisers. My dad is, though, and NYT is still getting his impressions.

As an example of what this might mean, imagine that anyone who made less than, say, $150k/year stopped visiting Reddit. They'd lose a huge amount of traffic, but the value of the remaining traffic would make their sellable demographics outstanding.

eli• 15 years ago

The remaining eyeballs are also likely to be more valuable. I'm sure many advertisers would pay a premium to have their product shown to the sort of people who don't mind spending hundreds of dollars a year for a website. They also should have better demographics for paying customers to present to advertisers.

dlss• 15 years ago

I did _not_ know about the excess inventory. Do you mind posting a source?

It just seems like someone would be willing to pay $0.001 CPM at least for those impressions...

(edit: this HN post, interestingly enough, seems to be the top of my google searches for this :p)

mrkurt3• 15 years ago

I'm the source! Although you can identify excess inventory on sites if you know what to look for and pay enough attention. Browse around the NYT site and you'll see ads for the NYT, Google Adwords, and probably Google display stuff. This is excess inventory, usually. Ads for your own company are called "house ads", the others are generally referred to as remnant inventory.

Now, someone will almost always pay $.001/CPM to serve ads, but it's usually not a great deal for a publisher. Ad serving costs are higher than you'd expect, a pageview might end up requiring calls to 10 paid ad tech services for instance (demographics, audience categorization, etc). The NYT is likely losing money when you see remnant advertising, they'd be better off not serving that impression at all.

There are also a number of companies that just won't run remnant stuff, or won't run ads for reasonable sounding CPMs. Conde Nast, for instance, has fixed CPMs that their sales people can't bend from much. They feel that selling for cheaper would dilute their value. Some of the properties even feel like cheap looking remnant ads make the site seem less "premium".

The last sentence here is pretty telling: "since the site had excess ad inventory pre-paywall, the decline won’t affect the ability to satisfy demand for premium units".

http://blogs.forbes.com/jeffbercovici/2011/04/21/ny-times-sa...

z0r• 15 years ago

That's why advertising exchanges are picking up - put up an auction for each impression for which you have no ad to run, maybe set a reserve, and you're off to the races!

protomyth• 15 years ago

Are they making more or less money?

http://seekingalpha.com/article/264920-the-new-york-times-ce...

yakto3• 15 years ago

Q1 2011 revenues were down 4%, but since the paywall didn't launch until mid-March, we'll have to wait until the next quarterly to learn the full early results of the change.

aw3c2• 15 years ago

Since when is Google Trends reliable enough to make valid assumptions about the visitor statistics of a website?

fleitz• 15 years ago

Yes, but how much is their profit down?

athst2• 15 years ago

I'd highly recommending the documentary "Page One" that just came out, which is about the NYT. It really makes you appreciate the work they do.

I know we laugh at their attempts to make money online, but that fact is that it would be a huge loss if they weren't able to continue to do their work.

alexinoz• 15 years ago

Something I find interesting to ponder is the value of brands in journalism. The NYT has a great brand and I'm sure most people would associate it with quality journalism.

Whatever the outcome for this paper (paid subscriptions and higher cpms or the opposite), I'm more interested in all the other mastheads out there with less brand equity.

As a guess I think most people will be more comfortable handing over their hard earned to WSJ or NYT than they will to their local rag.

So paywalls IMHO spell doom for all the other papers who don't have the same brand equity / reputation.

Would you pay $3.95 for your local paper before handing it to NYT or WSJ?

My 2c :)

donohoe• 15 years ago

As a former NYT developer (I left a month ago) but still in touch with my colleagues I can say there is a drop in Uniques and Page Views.

However, nothing like 40% and also within the internal predictions as far as I can tell.

I don't know that the Subscription policy is a run-away success for the NYT but it's certainly doing well.

I say this as a person who originally thought it was a bad idea.

NYTimes.com daily uniques down ~40% since paywall implementation

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