{"id":302779,"date":"2010-02-10T10:25:47","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T15:25:47","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.35687"},"modified":"2010-02-10T10:30:09","modified_gmt":"2010-02-10T15:30:09","slug":"how-the-new-york-times-swung-to-4th-quarter-profit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/302779","title":{"rendered":"How the New York Times Swung to 4th Quarter Profit"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times posted a surprising $90.9 million gain in the fourth quarter of 2009 as income tripled year-over-year based on cost cutting and improvements in the advertising market. To put things in perspective, the company lost about $100 million in the third quarter of 2008, so this is good news for the company. But the revenue model is in violent flux. Last year the Times’ announced<\/a> that for the first time in history, it was collecting more from readers than advertisers — “in an industry where advertising revenue traditionally outweighed revenue from circulation by at least three to one.” <\/p>\n

Let’s look at the hard numbers from Q4:
____<\/p>\n

What’s Up<\/b>:<\/p>\n

1. Income<\/b>: The Times’ $90 million fourth quarter brought yearly income to $19.9 million.<\/p>\n

2. Cost Cutting<\/b>: The company cut $475 million in all of 2009, or 15.5% of its operating costs.<\/p>\n

3. Digital Advertising<\/b>: Q4 saw a 11 percent increase in digital ads
\n(which include newspaper sites liek NYTimes.com and digital properties like
\nAbout.com). Online ads now comprise 23 percent of the total ad pie for
\nNYT.<\/p>\n

4. Circulation Revenue: <\/b>Circulation revenue inched up 2.4%<\/a>, after the Times increased newspaper prices for the Boston Globe and NYT last year, according to the Globe.
\n_____<\/p>\n

What’s Down<\/b>:<\/p>\n

1. Overall Revenue<\/b>: Fourth quarter revenue fell $681 million, or 11.5%. That’s an improvement over Q3, when revenue dropped 17%.<\/p>\n

2. Assets<\/b>: To help repay $769 million debt, the Times sold its
\nNYC classical station in October and still has plans to shed its
\ninterest in the Boston Red Sox and New England Sports Network regional
\ncable channel, according to the WSJ<\/a>. Last year the company slashed its debt by $290 million.<\/p>\n

3. Print Advertising<\/b>: Paper ads dropped another 20%
\nyear-over-year in Q4. That is an improvement, since they had been
\nfalling 30% for most of 2009.
\n_______-<\/p>\n

What It Means<\/b><\/p>\n

Here’s what the numbers tell me. The NYT newspaper will have to continue to cut costs to stay in the red. This will mean fewer reporters, shared bureaus, and a lighter global footprint. But the newspaper will not have to completely re-scramble its DNA<\/a>
\nto survive as a newspaper\/blog hub hybrid. It’s short term strategy
\nwill be to shed assets as overall revenue continues to fall. Its long
\nterm strategy should be to augment its circulation pipeline. <\/p>\n

In eleven months, the Times is scheduled to unveil a metered pay model
\nthat will charge readers for navigating their site (it won’t count
\nhorizontal clicks from blog posts and emails against the meter). Based
\non some back-of-the-envelope math, The Big Money’s Frederic Filloux
\nestimated that if the Times could convince 10 percent of its online
\nreaders to pay about $3 dollars a month for the site, it could see a 20
\npercent bump in online ad revenue. It’s good to see that digital ads
\nare recovering, but as that portion of the pie grows, the Times’ CPMs
\nwill still not be able to sustain the company’s fundamental mission to
\nreport original, global news. The Times is smart to innovate with a
\nmeter, and it’s also smart to delay that innovation a year so it can
\ncut dead weight assets in the interim.


\n

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\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times posted a surprising $90.9 million gain in the fourth quarter of 2009 as income tripled year-over-year based on cost cutting and improvements in the advertising market. To put things in perspective, the company lost about $100 million in the third quarter of 2008, so this is good news for the company. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-302779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}