The Athletic keeps growing .......

I paid, I think, $45 for my year of The Athletic, and that was before they added my home city. I will say that it really needs to do some work on the organization/UI of its mobile app. I’d be interested to know the web/app traffic breakdown, but it sure looks like they’re designing web-first.

 

Well damn, I thought I got a pretty significant discount. This was several months ago.

 

Yeah, I didn't figure I had the numbers exactly right. The point was just that they have some time to build up those subscription numbers before the money runs out.

 

I've been told they're not paying nearly as much as what you might think. The big names, sure. But many of the run-of-the-mill reporters aren't pulling in six figure or even high 5 figure salaries. I'm not sure they need to do that, either. How many newspapers are offering $60K these days for new hires?

 

I for sure didn't think they were paying that kind of money for beat guys.

 

I've heard that they hired some beat writers who were making, say, $72,000 at their newspaper gig by offering them $82,000. But that might be on limied occasions. And again, a lot of the big names are contractors who might be writing once a month. The whole effort, in any case, is certainly refreshing.

 

Let's try to throw some numbers around for the Athletic.

There are 123 teams in the NFL. MLB, NBA and NHL. Let's just say that the Athletic goes to two beat reporters for NFL and MLB teams and one for NBA and NHL. I think that is generally how those beats are staffed at the largest metro covering the team. So that is 185 reporters.

There are 64 teams in the Power Five conferences. Let's add 100 staffers for these schools and and other large universities such as Notre Dame, UNLV, etc.

Add another 50 writers to serve as national writers for the aforementioned sports and to cover golf, NASCAR, etc.

The above totals to 330 reporters. I am just throwing numbers out here but let's assign a number of 100K to salary and benefits for each reporter and 50k in other editorial costs of 50K for travel, etc. So a staff of 330 costs about 50 million dollars.

I think the Athletic to be successful is going to have to invest a lot more in web production. The Athletic customer is more interested in sports than the average visitor to the ESPN site as demonstrated by his willingness to pay. So the Athletic subscriber needs to receive access to the box scores, game casts and other material as fast as the ESPN site visitor. So let's add another 25 million for production and 45 millions for servers, advertising salesmen, accountants, etc. I get total costs of 120 million a year.

So if the Athletic can get up to 1.5 million subscribers at $60 a subscription that is 90 million in revenues. They should be able to cover the remaining gap with advertising.

Is 1.5 million possible? In it's heyday I think SI had three millions subscribers and if memory they were charging about $35 a year fora weekly. I think the Sporting News had a subscription base somewhere under a million and was charging a similar rate.

I think that it is possible. I wonder if the Athletic might be a little early in the market. I think that right now the Athletic offers coverage comparable to what I get with my Denver Post electronic subscription. In two years who knows what the Post and other large metros will be doing if staffing cuts continue. In a couple of years most sports staffs will be so gutted that second beat writers on teams will have gone the way of sports media columnists, golf writers and other artifacts of a more prosperous time. In a couple of years a national daily may be the only sports coverage anyone can receive in many markets.

I made these numbers and I am aware that there are others out there who know a hell of a lot than me about the newspaper industry so feel free to correct me.

 

While it maybe would be ideal to become a one-stop shop for everything about every team, I don't think that's the goal here. Why should The Athletic put a ton of money into supplying a service that readers can find elsewhere for free? People aren't looking to pay for box scores and game casts. Why would they?

Honestly, this sounds similar to the evolution of papers. Rather than just sticking in their lane, they started adding things like video content to the online product because they thought they had be a one-stop shop online. Stay in your lane.

 

Who's the money behind this again?