This has been true since approximately the beginning of newspaper-time.
How much more would you be willing to pay to go entirely ad-free?
From the NYT annual report [1], it appears that they made ~$1B in subscription revenue and $0.5B in advertising revenue last year. If you're willing to pay >50% more (if you can afford more, you're probably more valuable as an advertising target), NYT is probably interested.
There was a real cost to printing single newspaper to me. I've no idea what it was, or is now, but it's about a million times more than the cost of me reading every new story on the NY Times website today. Maybe not a million times, but it's certainly much higher.
So while I do agree newspapers have always been ads with some news thrown in there to get people to look at the paper, there were some much higher costs there in the paper part of the newspaper (and printers and delivery people and so on). In theory the cost of how I read "the paper" now should be much lower, so if I pay to subscribe to the website maybe there shouldn't be ANY ads? Or far fewer?
I guess my thinking is nytimes.com isn't the same thing as The NY Times I get delivered to my house, so maybe things like ads should be treated in a different way? Sure the people that make it and reporters and news and all that are the same, but how I consume the actual thing is significantly different and has a different cost model.
Plus those print ads were/are WAY different in so many ways.
It still costs a lot of money to send reporters all over the world and do lengthy investigative journalism, regardless of if it is delivered to you in print or digital format. And NYT does charge more for physical paper delivery than they do for online-only subscriptions.
> So while I do agree newspapers have always been ads with some news thrown in there to get people to look at the paper, there were some much higher costs there in the paper part of the newspaper
Distribution costs went down, but so did ad revenue.
It used to be that a subscription primarily paid for the cost of printing/distribution, and the real profit came from advertising. Unfortunately, print ads use to pay significantly more than web ads do today. So while the distribution costs are lower, most newspapers now need both revenue sources.
Print ads are so much better than online ads though.
- Print ads generally don't break reading lines as most of them are generally between articles or between pages
- Print ads don't move.
There are multiple moving ads in between paras of a long form online articles which is a much worse experience than reading the same article in print.
Unfortunately, what has been true since the beginning of newspaper time changes in the digital era, as every newspaper has learned painfully.
If too many users don't expect to see ads once they subscribe, then it doesn't matter what the cost model is; NYT has to adapt to the market's demands, change their costs, or shut down.
Existence of Tier 3 reduces Tier 2's value more than money taken from Tier 3.
NYT's sales pitch to advertisers is access to the intellectual/monetary elite. Saying "here, you can access only the less spendy ones" isn't going to be good.
I find it a little funny that you're picking on NYT for that one. They were one of the first to offer digital-only subscriptions and their numbers have been climbing steadily since around 2011 when the introduced their metered paywall.
It's not that users don't expect to see ads that revenue is down. It's that the ad-sell business has been effectively taken over by a few large actors who promise all kinds of growth because of their targeted/tracking ad networks.
And presently ad revenue is down even further because many businesses first spending cuts were in advertising for Q2/Q3 since they aren't operating anyway. That said, this last point is only speaking from my own present industry experience.
> This has been true since approximately the beginning of newspaper-time.
Newspaper journalism has been a joke the entire time too, so it’s not clear what your point is. The NyTimes is a shining example of how having two sets of customers to please lowers the quality of reported news.
When Doubleclick emerged they were essentially self hosting ads.
Back then the digital vision wasn't in those media centres. They got online quickly, but they were not operating active engineering departments. Their industry was news. Advertising was a supplement, not the primary business. Hindsight is 20/20, for sure, though.
I think this is a good move by NYT. I only wish the companies I've been associated with had the kind of resources to do the same. But it's expensive to even start something like that. For many companies in the space the resources are already spread thin.
It would be unblockable too if they just had them as static images in the page. Unless you spent hours tailoring your filters and engaging in an arms race with the sysadmin, you wouldn't ever be able to win and correctly call an image an image and an ad an ad.
How do I know they aren't just proxying the request through their servers? It's third party but just transparently loaded through the same server as the rest of the content.
What's interesting to me is that in Noam Chomsky's Propaganda Model, one of the factors that make corporate media like the NYT the voice of the state and large corporations is their need for advertising dollars. If they even slightly flinch in their editorial line, the ad dollars go elsewhere, which Chomsky documented.
I was about to say that the reason there's no ad free option is that advertising so dominates subscriber fees, the correct way to look at this is that they are selling audiences to other large corporations rather than in some sense serving their readers. However, their 2020 financial report shows that subscriber revenues have recently eclipsed their advertising revenue starting in 2015.
The subscriber revenue was about a third larger than the ad revenue then. This is kind of an interesting difference. If the advertising revenue keeps dwindling, the editorial line will become more responsive to their subscribers rather than their advertisers. Of course, the subscriber base is going to be mainly middle to upper class and college educated, and those people believe many of the same things the corporations believe. However, I would hope that this would make the NYT marginally more populist and pro-worker and less oriented towards invading other countries which they currently nearly always support uncritically. I don't think there's any hope for them going further than that, but prying the cold dead fingers of the business community off the editorial line of the nation's paper of record would open a crack in the door.
Their ad revenue might actually go up after switching to first-party ads, since those ads will probably be blocked less often than third party ads. Personally at least, 1st party ads are the only ones that ever slip through my ad blockers, and I rarely bother to block them myself.
I think this is probably the reason they're switching to 1st party ads. The ad revenue in 2015 was still very substantial. They won't want to give that up without a fight.
I canceled my subscription due to their insistence on ads at any level of support (I asked their customer service about it). Stuck with the Washington Post which seems to be okay with charging more and displaying zero ads.
Was this an additional option or higher subscription? I currently have a Washington Post subscription and, with my ad blocker disabled, see plenty of ads.
In the EU, there's a WaPo subscription level that explicitly touts "no on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking" as a benefit: https://imgur.com/yWPXBYe
I do not see ads by default as an NYT subscriber but they have prompted me with a big bottom banner splash in the past to allow ads as a subscriber. I declined and haven't seen any ads that I'm aware of since.
Sounds like there are ads in the app maybe? But I see zero in the browser as well.
At the vast majority of publications, there's intentionally no relationship between advertising-type decision-making and what the editorial staff decides to write about.
Except when they write submarine pieces, which are in fact just ads in sheep's clothing.
But besides that, advertisers having no direct decision-making powers in news publishing doesn't mean journalism doesn't get corrupted by it. From the POV of the publisher, advertising can be seen as a magic button that makes them a little bit of money each time a visitor presses it. Having it as the main profit source, their primary driver now becomes ensuring as many visitors as possible press this button as frequently as possible. That's how we arrive at reputable publications serving clickbait, writing outrage-inducing noninformative articles, and embedding chumboxes in their articles. That's how the "invented pyramid" - the golden standard of news publishing that nobody cares about anymore - became dead and buried.
I had to look up "submarine pieces" are, but they don't seem at all related to the effects of advertising on what editorial teams write about. In my experience that just sounds like shoddy journalism, and editors shouldn't be letting that pass (even though it happens).
What you're describing isn't a new phenomenon: newspaper ads have been around forever, and getting more people to read your newspaper or click on your articles has always increased profit. That's why most reputable newspapers, when they get large enough, build strong firewalls between the business and editorial sides of the company such that publishers cannot exert pressure over their editorial team even if they were short-sighted enough to try.
I'd say this is a new phenomenon, to the extent people no longer read whole newspapers, but individual articles. Previously, there was no point in clickbait beyond optimizing the front page. If a reader bought the paper, that's about all the money you could get from them. In the Internet era, every single article is its own earning unit, so every one has to be optimized to maximize ad impressions. Hence clickbait, chumboxes, slideshows, and countless other forms of crap replacing actual journalism.
> I had to look up "submarine pieces" are, but they don't seem at all related to the effects of advertising on what editorial teams write about. In my experience that just sounds like shoddy journalism, and editors shouldn't be letting that pass (even though it happens).
What did you find? I assumed the term meant something like a sponsored-content advertorial, but after actually Googling it, it looks like the term isn't a common one. All I get are hits about Grand Theft Auto V and Peter Madsen.
It seems like the term stems from this article (http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html). If that's correct, I'm inclined to agree that it's just shoddy journalism, and the better publications don't let it through:
> Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms. At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for free if advertisers would let them. [2] The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for "content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim, if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.
> At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed to crack the print edition of the Times. [3]
> [3] Different sections of the Times vary so much in their standards that they're practically different papers. Whoever fed the style section reporter this story about suits coming back would have been sent packing by the regular news reporters.
One of the anecdotes later in the article really emphasizes to me how public relations is literally propaganda with a PR makeover:
> Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.
It the mechanics sound similar to the Soviet propaganda/disinformation campaign that pushed the idea that the US military created AIDS/HIV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo.
I, too, enjoyed skimming search results about Grand Theft Auto and Peter Madsen and ended up with the same article you did (via another HN thread). Unsurprisingly I drew the same conclusions you did.
Just because you deny the existence of an intentional relationship doesn't mean there's an unintentional one dictated by the market, so the advertiser-friendly newspaper will thrive while the advertiser-hostile one will lose major ad deals, and potentially go out of business.
> financing and having access to functional journalism is more important than avoiding ads
I'd say a vast majority of people agree, and are willing to pay a premium to support journalists AND not see advertisements. Unfortunately that's not an option.
When I subscribed to LA times they just replaced their nonsubscriber banner ad with a 'taste of LA for subscribers only' banner ad. Didn't hesitate and just blocked the element.
I've found their ad targeting to be laughably bad, even with 3rd party data. It's mostly ads for things that I have no interest in -- I don't give a flying fuck about golf, but saw a barrage of ads over a couple weeks for golf clubs.
