The NYT has reported slowing subscription sales, but only from a truly remarkable increase from a low base. But the striking thing to me is that the meter is now bringing in $150 million a year to the NYT:
To put that $150 million in new revenue in perspective, consider that the Times Company as a whole will take in roughly $210 million in digital ads this year. And that $150 million doesn’t capture the paywall’s positive impact on print circulation revenue. Altogether, the company has roughly $360 million in digital revenue. Digital ads were again the weak spot (beyond print ads, which goes without saying). They declined 3 percent in the quarter—something that has to be turned around somehow.
The percentage increase in subscription revenue is exactly the same as the percentage drop in ad revenue:
Circulation revenues in the second quarter of 2013 rose 5.1 percent over the same period the year before, a company earnings report says. Advertising revenue fell 5.8 percent over the same period. Overall, revenue was down by .9 percent.
As for the Dish, only seven months into a subscription model, we’re seeing steady increases in subscriptions since the big bang of subscriptions that happened when we went independent in February. Here’s the graph for subscription revenue since the end of March:
We still have the tough problem of getting all our original January – March 2013 subscribers to renew next year, since we couldn’t put you on auto-renewal when we launched the new site because we were still on the Daily Beast platform, and we had yet to develop the full subscription system that is now in place for all new Dishheads. So the beginning of next year may be a little nerve-wracking – even though I’m pretty confident that our earliest strongest supporters are the most likely to renew of anyone.
As for total revenue, we’re now at $736k toward our original goal of $900k by next February 1 ($900k being the total budget we had at the last year at the Beast). If subscriptions keep coming in at the current rate, we look set to come close. Conversion rates (the percentage of total readers who choose to subscribe) look pretty steady too at around 2.3 percent, a smidgen higher than the industry average:
The total number of subscribers is now 28,271 as of 5.45 pm today. 11,000 more of you are now on expired meters – having used up all your read-ons. If you all decided to [tinypass_offer text=”subscribe today”], we’d be able to make some serious, solid plans for future investment in the site. So [tinypass_offer text=”please do”]. If you’ve clicked through to the max on all your devices, you really are a Dishhead. The cost is only $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year as a minimum. And if more of you [tinypass_offer text=”subscribe”], we may even be able to avoid advertizing altogether – meaning more signal and less noise to your website.
Subscribe [tinypass_offer text=”here”]. It takes [tinypass_offer text=”two minutes max”]. And [tinypass_offer text=”help shift”] the direction of new media toward quality rather than ad-driven pageviews.
The Dish 