The Newsonomics of the Piano/Press+ Merger, Creating the World’s Largest Paywall Tech Company

 How fast has the paywall revolution swept the daily newspaper world? This adoption of charging for digital access took flight as the New York Times pioneered its general news pay model in 2011, and the rest is history: half of U.S. dailies and as many as 20 percent of European dailies have ...

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The Newsonomics of Hearst Magazines’ One Million New Customers

Hearst’s strategy here is one to watch. There are good reasons (more on that below) why daily newspapers have opted to go for door number one and get more money from long-time subscribers while making new subs a largely second priority. But they know that’s a two- to three-year strategy. As ...

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NYT & Mark Thompson’s First Report: Unsteady as She Goes

2012 is the first year in which circulation revenue has surpassed advertising revenue. Full-year, it's now 51% of all revenues. Especially given the continued ad decline, that majority revenue number is hugely important. It's now the foundation of the business, and it gives the Times the only ...

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The Newsonomics of 2013 Wizardry: Tribune, Buffett, Murdoch, Paton, Bloomberg, and more

Today, though, most of the reporting power, much of the brand power, and thepolitical power still resides in big companies and their leadership. We may well get our strongest display of that early in 2013: In Washington, the FCC cross-ownership debate may move to center stage in January. And ...

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The Newsonomics of All-Access Delight

Remember the first time you got cross-platform delight? For me, it was when I started a second look at “Lost in Translation” on my TV, happened to click on my Netflix app while working out the next day, and was astounded to see the film paused precisely and ready to start where I’d left off, ...

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The Newsonomics of Pricing 101

Let’s start with this basic principle: People won’t pay you for content if you don’t ask them to. That’s an inside-the-industry joke, but one with too much reality to sustain much laughter. It took the industry a long time to start testing offers and price points, as The Wall Street Journal and ...

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The Newsonomics of Next Issue’s New All-You-Can-Eat Magazine Newsstand

In the hurly-burly of digital content innovation and monetization, it’s hard to figure out what things are, so we try to find apt comparisons. With the new Next Issue digital newsstand, let’s think Netflix or Pandora or Spotify as the closest cousins. Next Issue, the offspring of five ...

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The Newsonomics of 100 Products a Year

The 100-product-a-year model is a much-needed growth model. We can see how it fits nicely with all-access subscriptions, and together we have two interconnected Lego blocks of a new sustainable news model. We have two essential parts of a crossover model ("The Newsonomics of Crossover") that ...

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The Newsonomics of Crossover

What percent of print ad loss is made up by digital ad gain? This is the crossover metric driving much of John Paton’s Digital First Media/Journal Register Company strategy. With print advertising down now more than 50 percent in 10 years in the U.S., and even diving more quickly now in some ...

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At Almost 400,000 Digital Subscribers, Inside the New York Times Pay Strategy, Year 2

Takeaways: It's 12% of the the New York Times overall circulation revenue for the year. That puts the annual circulation number in positive territory -- up 3% for the year, and a lively 8% for the fourth quarter -- reversing the 2010 trend. It's $100 million less (about 186 M for New York ...

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