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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 Times itself) than the amount of digital advertising revenue for the year. So it’s important, but the digital ad number still is more decisive in making up for the print revenue decline. Despite 10% digital ad growth for the News Media group (without About properties), the NYT property still saw a 3% decline in ad revenue for the year. One more way to look at it: the Times took in $22 million less in advertising overall in 2011, so new digital circulation revenue exceeded that decline by 4X.

It’s 1.1% of the Times’ 33 million U.S. unique visitors, once we take out international buyers. That one percent seems like a tiny number, but it’s 34% of its print circulation. Anyhow, “total unique visitors” are getting to be close to an irrelevant number. Paid readers who also consume a majority or strong plurality of page views are the customers the Times’ care about.

It’s four times ousted CEO Janet Robinson’s good-bye payout. That’s small consolidation to outraged staffers, dealing with their own 1% issue.

It’s four times the dividend family members are hoping to see reinstated. The dividend paid out $20.8 million in 2008. Even they need to be kept happy to keep the Times out of public play, there are few new dollars to assuage them.

Consider how much revenue each of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon earned from outside the U.S in the first three quarters of 2011:

Google: 54 percent
Apple: 54 percent
Facebook: 38 percent
Amazon: 46 percent

Forget “content wants to be free.” Now content wants a fee. And everyone from Time Inc to The New York Times to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to Hulu’s co-owners (Fox, Disney, and Comcast) see gold. They see another digital revenue stream, in addition to advertising or to cable subscription fees. Yet they are increasingly believing they’ve got to up the ante (and Hulu is raising new funds to buy original programming) to compete and to win those consumer dollars. News companies — at least one in ten U.S. daily newspapers and many consumer magazines — are rapidly embracing digital circulation revenue and All-Access. Yet results have been quite uneven. That makes sense: Consumers will pay for digital news, feature, and entertainment content, but they don’t want to overpay, and they’ll increasingly be forced to make choices. Buy this; let that go.

Today, in 2012, those questions are more pressing in our age of news deluge. We’re confronted at every turn, at every finger gesture, with more to read or view or listen to. It’s not just the web: It’s also the smartphone and especially the tablet, birthing new aggregator products — Google Currents and Yahoo Livestand have joined Flipboard, Pulse, Zite, and AOL Editions — every month. Compare for a moment the “top stories” you get on each side-by-side, and you’ll be amazed. How did they get there? Why are they so different?

Was it some checkbox I checked (or didn’t?!) at sign-in? Using Facebook to sign in seemed so easy, but how is that affecting what I get? Are all those Twitterees I followed determining my story selection? (Or maybe that’s why I’m getting so many Chinese and German stories?) Did I tell the Times to give the sports section such low priority? The questions are endless, a ball of twine we’ve spun in declaring some preferences in our profiles over the years, wound ever wider by the intended or (or un-) social curation of Facebook and Twitter, and multiplied by the unseen but all-knowing algorithms that think they know what we really want to read, more than we do. (What if they are right? Hold that thought.)

The Infinity Stopper: The Internet has just gotten too big for its britches. It is spilling over into our bedrooms, through tablets and smartphones. It assaults us in elevators. It even threatens the passivity of our living-room TV experience, a particular hazard to our culture as Americans lead the world (save Serbia and Macedonia) in couch potatohood. The Infinity Stopper, though, handily offers to put a plug in some of that content, boundaries you know that any media psychologist will tell you are the must-have for 2012. Somehow, The Economist (“Yet Another Reason the Economist is Trouncing Competitors“) got one of the beta Infinity Stoppers and has been going to town with it, extending its limited print franchise into a limited (and quite successful) digital franchise. The simple secret of the Infinity Stopper: a beginning, a middle — and ta-da — an end to the stream of content. As infinity-loving tablet aggregator products now prolliferate (Google Currents and Yahoo Livestand joining Flipboard, Pulse and Zite), both The Daily and AOL’s Editions test out their own versions of the Infinity Stopper, offering a daily snapshot for infinity sufferers. Expect the sale of Infinity Stoppers to mushroom, as publishers just say “no.”

We can point to three major phenomena that profoundly changed the news landscape this year. Each offers up its own half-formed metrics for that magic formula in process, and each has dramatically changed the possibilities of news, each largely positive:

1) The transcendant transformative age of the tablet
2) The dawn of digital circulation
3) Social curation joins editorial curation:

There’s an irony to such publisher partnerships, of course. On the one hand, Google is a “partner,” magnifying publisher businesses through its ad and search products. On the other, initiatives such as Google Tomorrow are a potential dagger to newspapers’ jugular. That’s the way of the web world. For Google, or Amazon, or Apple, or Facebook, any new initiative it takes on has its own internal logic. Should another industry — say newspapers — be wounded in the process, it’s just collateral damage. Given the size of these digital behemoths, as they decimate legacy industries, you can almost hear them say, “Sorry, did I sideswipe you? I didn’t feel anything.”

The deep freeze in the U.S. newspaper market thawed a bit over the last couple of weeks. There really hasn’t been much of a market for metro newspapers for almost half a decade. With advertising revenue down now 21 quarters in a row, it’s near-impossible to fix a value on newspaper properties. For valuation, we’d need some high likelihood of stable profitability for the next several years, and that’s not in the cards. So what do we make of the three recently announced sales? In each case, there’s a strong, willful buyer, bucking conventional business sense to bull ahead into 2012.

2012 budgeting, still in full swing at many newspaper companies, is too much like a medical examiner’s exercise. What I hear: Dailies are budgeting down from mid-single digits to as high as low double-digits in print advertising for 2012, compared to 2011. That would compare to how much they’ve already lost this year, compared to last year. Those are brutal numbers.

With the launch of Livestand, we see the beginning of Aggregator Wars 2.0, to be fought on a tablet near you.

Livestand pushes the question: How are we going to receive news and features via the tablet, through individual apps (paid or free) or through an aggregator? And how are publishers going to monetize their content and audiences, as those audiences move dramatically from newspaper, magazine and broadcast to the tablet? A Pew data point: “A majority, say the tablet takes the place of what they used to get from a print newspaper or magazine (59 percent) or as a substitute for television news (57 percent).” (See “The Newsonomics of the Missing Link,”) So let’s look at the Newsonomics of Livestand.