Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle

http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs-twice-as-much-as-sending-every-subscriber-a-free-kindle

by troystribling • 17 years ago

19 12 17 years ago

jshajan• 17 years ago

Printing news should have gone out of style a long time ago. We should have had, for some time now, a lightweight electronic notepad-sized device that just downloads thew news every morning that we grab on our way out the door. The money spent on printing is unnecessary and obscene. While I concede, for those who grew up on printed news, there's a certain comfort in the experience...there's just so much of a benefit to a digital version of it..aka the internet!

blackguardx• 17 years ago

I find it very nice to be able to sit at a coffee shop or restaurant and read a newspaper without worrying about spilling food/drink on it. You can't do that with electronics.

jerf• 17 years ago

"You can't do that with electronics." - yet. Electronics have come in hard, bulky cases simply because they have to anyhow. Shrinking them a little bit still means you have a hard, bulky case.

But we're within spitting distance of being able to build something like the Kindle as a flexible, waterproof thing thicker than paper, but not too much thicker than paper, with a single bit of bulky electronics attached to the bottom for the battery. Not sure it'll ever work as a broadsheet, which wasn't really chosen for your convenience, but a nice 8x11 or A4 sheet of paper, sure.

Now, when I say "spitting distance", I still mean "5 to 10 years". But it no longer requires fundamental breakthroughs, just feasible advances.

(Also, don't read my specs too literally. We'll have to play with the design space before we work the optimal design out, but "something I can read over coffee" will definitely be a niche.)

moe• 17 years ago

I find it very nice to be able to sit at a coffee shop or restaurant and read a newspaper

Really? I've always wondered how people cope with the sheer size and format of these things. I hardly ever read a newspaper simply because the involved acrobatic puts me off. Especially on the breakfast table I much prefer a simple magazine or book that I can lay down or hold with one hand.

You ofcourse have a point with the spilling/dropping issue but I think a kindle could easily be made robust enough to survive a certain degree of abuse.

mattmcknight• 17 years ago

But given that they are making their money primarily as an advertising delivery device, how effective are ads on the Kindle?

One large advantage of the newspaper, as an ad delivery medium, is its size. It's hard to go from a huge visually scannable paper to a paged set of articles, where the ads invade the optimal page size.

I am completely sick of advertising, but it's hard to pay for a large news gathering operation without it.

jonknee• 17 years ago

I'm guessing people would put up with a fair amount of advertising if they got a free Kindle. I read a PDF copy of our locale free daily and the ads are still quite noticeable. I know it's not on a kindle, but if you flip through page by page you are still going to notice things. The ads would have to be reformatted, to be more inline, but that's doable.

And it's twice as cheap to buy a Kindle in year 1. Year two is $644m in savings. That's a lot of ads that don't have to be sold, a lot of sales staff who don't have to be selling it, etc etc.

Herring2• 17 years ago

Dividing total printing costs by number of subscribers is very misleading.

mlinsey• 17 years ago

I'm reposting my comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459211) from the previous submission on this topic :http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459017

Note that this article compares the costs of printing all copies of the New York Times to sending only subscribers free Kindles.

I started this post expecting to explain how this made the NYT's printing costs sound a bit more reasonable. Then I found that according to Wikipedia, which cites a 2007 release by the paper itself, the daily circulation of the New York Times is 1,000,665 Daily and 1,438,585 on Sundays. I am honestly quite surprised that the number of papers sold at newsstands and vending machines is therefore under 200K on weekdays. Using these figures and building off of SAI's estimates, the cost of printing copies just for subscribers is probably about $503 million, or still enough for just under 1.7 kindles per subscriber.

Note also that neither bandwidth costs nor the costs of delivering papers is counted. I presume factoring this in would make the print newspaper look even worse.

As a reply, Kaizyn pointed out that people are more likely to share copies of the paper NYT than their Kindle. I think that's a good point, but I'm not sure how to account for it at all.

Herring2• 17 years ago

1.7 kindles per subscriber per year, you mean. It's probably cleaner to work out how long it would take to recoup that 'investment' assuming subscriber readership & ad revenue don't change. He also assumes wages outside the newsroom are all in printing, which makes no sense.

The article says 2 kindles over a year's costs, so his t=0.5 yr. If cutting out 4/5 of the dead tree edition doesn't do much outside raw materials, t=6yrs, which is crazy.

Thing is it's all irrelevant. The assumptions & lack of information make the calculations useless. We already knew t>0, that's not a surprise.

tsally• 17 years ago

So send every subscriber a free Kindle.

(Seriously... or at least a Kindle like device that hooks into NYTimes content. It's a business move that News organizations should have made a long time ago.)

Zev• 17 years ago

What would you (ie: anyone who thinks NY Times should do this) suggest for colleges that give away free copies of newspapers to students?

silentbicycle• 17 years ago

1. Many people buy the NYT from newsstands, as noted elsewhere.

2. What about other costs, such as tech support?

Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle

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