Buzzfeed may be the future of news. They seem to be building a sustainable model to help fund real reporting. Other than the name, which doesn't really have that venerable institution/journalistic integrity feel, it's got a well-respected team and very legitimate reports. They create their own content and they seem to be doing it profitably.
The NY Times on the other hand, is trying desperately hard to stay relevant. They have that venerable institution feel (they define what that means). But, they have had all kinds of issues making money to keep supporting their business. They make money from advertising and subscriptions. Ad money is moving away from them, despite being a very highly ranked site (#35 in the US and #109 worldwide according to Alexa).
As their revenues drop, they made an attempt to build a new paywall. But, they [must have] left open the backdoor. They make it very easy for someone to read everything for free. First, they give you 20 free articles per month. Then, they gently nudge you to subscribe. Maybe it's not that gentle. But, it is easy to get around. You just need to clear your cookies or just delete the token they add after the article url and boom, free news.
That sounds too easy. Why would anyone pay? Some will because they want to support the company. Others because they don't know about getting around the paywall. But, since they get so much of their money from advertising, NYTimes cannot cut you off completely. They need random people to be able to access their content and be able to show an ad against it.
The Times gets ~7% of it's traffic from facebook and another ~3% from twitter. Those social streams are the key to distribution in the 21st century. They can't count on people walking by a newstand. No more is there a newsie on the street screaming "Extra! Extra!". Now, it's anyone and everyone sharing on facebook, twitter, by email and other means. Any organization trying to make any kind of money from advertising has to make it as frictionless as possible to share their content and drive traffic.
NYTimes is in a tough spot, but they're making some good moves. At some point, they'll have to dramatically reorganize the business. I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't happen until they sell the brand name to Buzzfeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment