![]() ![]() Although the industry was skeptical, the paywall was a smashing success. So it started what was probably a do-or-die experiment in 2011 – a paywall. Affected badly by the 2008 financial meltdown, the company had taken a loan of $250M from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to just stay afloat. And NYT, even though it showed strong growth, reported an annual revenue crossing $2B (for the first time since 2012).Īt the beginning of the last decade, NYT was pretty much in shambles. In stark contrast, newspapers in the USA brought in only $22.15B in the entire fiscal year 2020. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, posted a revenue of $75.3B in Q4 of 2021. Today, internet giants are the biggest companies we have ever known. Add to that the decreasing attention spans of the general public, and you have a recipe for disaster for the newspaper industry. The newspaper model was eroded bit by bit, and so was the advertising revenue. ![]() Small outlets could focus on key areas of expertise for next to no cost. Their business strategy was to bundle everything from news to opinion to sports to classifieds together and dominate the market.īut the internet changed it all. This made their disruption near impossible. Newspapers such as NYT had long enjoyed the benefit of having high fixed costs (printing presses, warehouses, reporters, distribution) and low marginal costs (paper and ink). You will find more infographics at Statista ![]() After that, it takes a dive, losing 80% of that value in less than 19 years to reach $12 bn in 2019. It shows newspaper advertising revenue in the USA climb up from approx $20B in the 1950s to $67B somewhere around 2000. There’s an infamous chart often shown in media strategy discussions. Why did New York Times need to change its business strategy? The questions I want to ask (and hopefully answer) are – When NYT already has a similar game based called Spelling Bee, why did it need to buy Wordle? How does Wordle fit into New York Times’s business strategy? Let’s get some historical context. So let’s get back to New York Times, and their acquisition of Wordle. ![]() Folks are looking at every aspect including information theory, business angles, and just pure fun. That social experience is why everyone is jumping on the Wordle-discussion bandwagon (including yours truly). I myself have seen the revival of more than one WhatsApp group just because the members started sharing their daily results. There’s just one simple website, there’s no need to make an account, and it’s free. It’s a daily community with a surprisingly low entry barrier. The kind of experience that is hard to come by in the era where every interaction is a scheduled Zoom call. And since everyone plays for the exact same word, it is also an invite to an informal but exclusive social experience. Sharing that grid of green, yellow, and grey boxes is a dopamine hit. And in this situation, bite-sized brain snacks were absolutely perfect for those looking for some light mental exercise.Īnd then there’s the social aspect. We started to lose time to mundane tasks. In 2020, ‘the end of the world’ stopped describing a mythical cataclysmic event and started to describe our present situation. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |