The New York Times Company announced
this week that TimesSelect, the much-maligned
premium-content program on NYTimes.com, had enrolled 270,000
subscribers. Martin Nisenholtz is rightfully pleased, but this
small victory doesn’t mean anything for most newspapers.
About half the subscribers aren’t paying for website access — they’re
existing print subscribers. The extra benefit of online access to
premium content may slow print subscriber churn and decline, but that
remains to be seen. It’s possible that most of the combo subscribers
love the print experience anyway and were not really at risk.
If you just look at the 135,000 or so online-only subscribers, the
numbers still may at first seem exciting. At a base subscription rate of
around $50 a year, you could bring in $6.75 million. Who wouldn’t want
that? But compared with the Times‘ existing $600 million or so in
circulation revenue, it’s a drop in the bucket.
And keep this in mind: The Times website is aimed at a worldwide market,
offering powerful voices like Nicholas Kristof, Frank Rich, Maureen
Dowd, and Dave Anderson in its premium package. And it’s doing that with
unique — and expensive — online-only packaging including video
storytelling. Can you fund that sort of effort?
Scale the numbers down from “the entire English-speaking world” to your
local market, then consider the inherently unscalable expense of
producing New York Times-quality content. Can you make that work?
As they might say in the Big Apple: fuggetaboutit. This revenue model
isn’t going to change the economics of local newspaper journalism.
