1) Increased subscription revenue
2) Sold inventory they've lost
3) Effect on pricing of remaining inventory
Oddly enough, a site like the NYT might be able to make more money off ads with less impressions (#3 up there). There are two reasons for this, the first is their brand value. People want their ads on NYT, scarcer supply means they'll have to pay more to do that, and some of them will.
The second is a change in demographics. I would guess that the lost traffic is disproportionately less valuable demographics. I, for instance, am not a great demographic for advertisers. My dad is, though, and NYT is still getting his impressions.
As an example of what this might mean, imagine that anyone who made less than, say, $150k/year stopped visiting Reddit. They'd lose a huge amount of traffic, but the value of the remaining traffic would make their sellable demographics outstanding.
It just seems like someone would be willing to pay $0.001 CPM at least for those impressions...
(edit: this HN post, interestingly enough, seems to be the top of my google searches for this :p)
Now, someone will almost always pay $.001/CPM to serve ads, but it's usually not a great deal for a publisher. Ad serving costs are higher than you'd expect, a pageview might end up requiring calls to 10 paid ad tech services for instance (demographics, audience categorization, etc). The NYT is likely losing money when you see remnant advertising, they'd be better off not serving that impression at all.
There are also a number of companies that just won't run remnant stuff, or won't run ads for reasonable sounding CPMs. Conde Nast, for instance, has fixed CPMs that their sales people can't bend from much. They feel that selling for cheaper would dilute their value. Some of the properties even feel like cheap looking remnant ads make the site seem less "premium".
The last sentence here is pretty telling: "since the site had excess ad inventory pre-paywall, the decline won’t affect the ability to satisfy demand for premium units".
http://blogs.forbes.com/jeffbercovici/2011/04/21/ny-times-sa...
When I'm browsing from my iPhone, I just click the little "x" at the top of the screen to stop the javascript from loading after the content has been downloaded - basically stops my iPhone from loading the paywall code, but loads all the content.
I always thought the paywall was really just to prevent the print subscribers from canceling their print subscription and switching over to web only - it convinces them they are getting value with their subscription. The Paywall itself was left deliberately leaky for people who only connected to it via the web.
But, based on the stats, it looks like there may be a large audience of casual subscribes that have been deterred from visiting the website - I'm sure that must be troubling for the NYT.
On a side note, the Android app used to be horribly buggy but a recent update seems to have fixed the issues. Anyone who was turned off before may want to give it another shot.
Also, and I don't know if they ever fixed it, the NYT wouldn't include their business graphics/charts on their iPad edition. Very Lame. WSJ is good about including all their content on their (in my opinion) much more elegant iPad App.
The paywall is price discrimination. A certain number of users are willing to pay for the NYT site, it's a way to let them do so.
EDIT: Sunday math; and should add shares: 147.18M.
Thanks for that tip! I cleared all my cookies once to get around it, but what a PIA to re-login to all my authenticated sites.
However, nothing like 40% and also within the internal predictions as far as I can tell.
I don't know that the Subscription policy is a run-away success for the NYT but it's certainly doing well.
I say this as a person who originally thought it was a bad idea.
I'm a datapoint of only one, but #1 above certainly applies in my case. I find myself much less likely to click through, especially on my mobile device, because I'm annoyed when I find myself above the monthly free limit. After hitting the limit a couple of months, I just stop clicking thru in the first place.
I'm also wondering how many of those 'dropped' uniques are scrapers, quick bounces, etc?
Whatever the outcome for this paper (paid subscriptions and higher cpms or the opposite), I'm more interested in all the other mastheads out there with less brand equity.
As a guess I think most people will be more comfortable handing over their hard earned to WSJ or NYT than they will to their local rag.
So paywalls IMHO spell doom for all the other papers who don't have the same brand equity / reputation.
Would you pay $3.95 for your local paper before handing it to NYT or WSJ?
My 2c :)
I know we laugh at their attempts to make money online, but that fact is that it would be a huge loss if they weren't able to continue to do their work.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/264920-the-new-york-times-ce...
