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Charting Revenue: How The New York Times Makes Money

by Freny Fernandes
This post is by Freny Fernandes from Visual Capitalist

When it comes to quality and accessible content, whether it be entertainment or news, consumers are often willing to pay for it.

Similar to the the precedent set by the music industry, many news outlets have also been figuring out how to transition into a paid digital monetization model. Over the past decade or so, The New York Times (NY Times)—one of the world’s most iconic and widely read news organizations—has been transforming its revenue model to fit this trend.

This chart from creator Trendline uses annual reports from the The New York Times Company to visualize how this seemingly simple transition helped the organization adapt to the digital era.

New York Times revenue in a bar chart

The New York Times’ Revenue Transition

The NY Times has always been one of the world’s most-widely circulated papers. Before the launch of its digital subscription model, it earned half its revenue from print and online advertisements.

The rest of its income came in through circulation and other avenues including licensing, referrals, commercial printing, events, and so on. But after annual revenues dropped by more than $500 million from 2006 to 2010, something had to change.

NY Revenue By YearPrint CirculationDigital SubscriptionAdvertisingOtherTotal
2003$623M$1,196M$168M$1,987M
2004$616M$1,222M$165M$2,003M
2005$616M$1,262M$157M$2,035M
2006$637M$1,269M$172M$2,078M
2007$646M$1,223M$183M$2,052M
2008$668M$1,068M$181M$1,917M
2009$683M$797M$101M$1,581M
2010$684M$780M$93M$1,557M
2011$659M$47M$756M$93M$1,555M
2012$681M$114M$712M$88M$1,595M
(Read more...)

Recommended Book

by Caterina Fake
This post is by Caterina Fake from Caterina.net

Having been housebound for the past two days, I was able to read this remarkable book about a family of fourteen, twelve children, of which six–six!–of the sons became schizophrenic in their teens and twenties. An amazing feat of research which follows the family’s story, as well as those of the doctors working to understand this puzzling, difficult and very disabling disease.

Twitter acquires distraction-free reading service Scroll to beef up its subscription product

by Sarah Perez

Twitter this morning announced it’s acquiring Scroll, a subscription service that offers readers a better way to read through long-form content on the web, by removing ads and other website clutter that can slow down the experience. The service will become a part of Twitter’s larger plans to invest in subscriptions, the company says, and will later be offered as one of the premium features Twitter will provide to subscribers.

Premium subscribers will be able to use Scroll to easily read their articles from news outlets and from Twitter’s own newsletters product, Revue, another recent acquisition that’s already been integrated into Twitter’s service. When subscribers use Scroll through Twitter, a portion of their subscription revenue would go to support the publishers and the writers creating the content, explains Twitter in an announcement.

Scroll’s service today works across hundreds of sites, including The Atlantic, The Verge, USA Today, The Sacramento Bee, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily Beast, among others. For readers, the experience of using Scroll is similar to that of a “reader view” — ads, trackers, and other website junk is stripped so readers can focus on the content.

Image Credits: Twitter

Scroll’s pitch to publishers has been that it can end up delivering cleaner content that can make them more money than advertising alone.

Deal terms were not disclosed, but Twitter will be bringing on the entire Scroll team, totalling 13 people.

For the time being, Scroll will pause new customer sign-ups so it can (Read more...)

Amira Learning raises $11M to put its AI-powered literacy tutor in post-COVID classrooms

by Devin Coldewey

School closures due to the pandemic have interrupted the learning processes of millions of kids, and without individual attention from teachers, reading skills in particular are taking a hit. Amira Learning aims to address this with an app that reads along with students, intelligently correcting errors in real time. Promising pilots and research mean the company is poised to go big as education changes, and it has raised $11 million to scale up with a new app and growing customer base.

In classrooms, a common exercise is to have students read aloud from a storybook or worksheet. The teacher listens carefully, stopping and correcting students on difficult words. This “guided reading” process is fundamental for both instruction and assessment: It not only helps the kids learn, but the teacher can break the class up into groups with similar reading levels so she can offer tailored lessons.

“Guided reading is needs-based, differentiated instruction and in COVID we couldn’t do it,” said Andrea Burkiett, director of Elementary Curriculum and Instruction at the Savannah-Chatham County Public School System. Breakout sessions are technically possible, “but when you’re talking about a kindergarten student who doesn’t even know how to use a mouse or touchpad, COVID basically made small groups nonexistent.”

Amira replicates the guided reading process by analyzing the child’s speech as they read through a story and identifying things like mispronunciations, skipped words and other common stumbles. It’s based on research going back 20 years that has tested whether learners using such an automated (Read more...)

August Reading

by Caterina Fake
This post is by Caterina Fake from Caterina.net

The stand out here, was of course, Middlemarch. I had read it in college and remember thinking to myself, “am I really going to expend my youth reading about agricultural practices in 19th century rural England?” But of course, it is so much more. Many people have called it the greatest English novel, and, to disprove this opinion, I would have to read a whole lot more English novels. So I provisionally agree. 

Last month’s reading of Faulkner required the antidote of Morrison, and I read her essays, and her first novel The Bluest Eye.  Also of undisputed greatness–though censors the world over have been trying to suppress it for years. I doubt they’ve read it. 

The book that left me straddling the fence, wavering in opinion, and wondering about its suitability for prize-winning, was the International Booker Prize winner, The Discomfort of Evening–which announcement and ceremony I accidentally happened upon as it was taking place live online. Prizes invite dispute, which enlivens book reading in general, so I welcome them. The book was great, but green. I was amazed to learn that the distinguished judges read all the contenders, starting with 128 books. 

And if you haven’t already read Signs Preceding the End of the World, run don’t walk to your local bookstore, and pick it up curbside. 

 

Middlemarch and Civil Society. Chapters 23-42

by Caterina Fake
This post is by Caterina Fake from Caterina.net

Occasionally, in literature, good men appear. I am thinking of Martin Cunningham, in Ulysses, who always had something kind to say on behalf of Leopold Bloom. And here in Middlemarch I encountered another one.

The good Caleb Garth, whose kind nature was exploited by the n’er-do-well spendthrift and gambler Fred Vincy, who impoverished his family and expunged their savings–Garth is offered his old job back, as the manager of the farmland for the local gentry, and he has this to say:

“…it’s a fine thing to come to a man when he’s seen into the nature of business; to have a chance of getting a bit of the country into good fettle, as they say, and putting men into the right way with their farming, and getting a bit of good contriving and solid building done that those who are living and those who come after will be the better for. I’d sooner have it than a fortune. I hold it the most honorable work that is. … it’s a great gift of God, Susan. “

“That It is, Caleb,” said his wife, with answering fervor. “And it will be a blessing to your children to have had a father who did such work: the father whose good work remains though his name may be forgotten.”

It is because criminals are occupying the highest offices in the nation, because the gangrene of corruption has spread to the furthest corners of America, because we are so endlessly subjected to the most (Read more...)