Seriously, what if newspapers did this?

It's never been about the product. From my meager understanding of the historical nature of the newspaper industry, the per copy price pays for printing and distribution, and the ads pay for everything else.

Do I have that wrong? If so, I apologize.

Anyway, advertisers have so many options to go with and that keeps prices down. A national company doesn't have to buy that banner ad from your site when ESPN can deliver localized ads.

 

Great post Captzulu. I read it all. I understand what you are saying. It is too late for newspapers and their first grade education owners/publishers to recover from this. The bottom line is newspapers have ruined their print product by slashing staff and losing their best writers. The online product doesn't make money.
Future of newspapers thanks to their moronic publishers who ruined the business: Online edition only with maybe one sports writer for each major beat. Maybe one or two copy editors. One or two Web designers. Coverage that won't even rival beat writers who quit to form their own blog websites.
I still say giving away one's product is asinine.
Only a foolish person would buy a newspaper now with the product entirely online for free.

 

Way to insult your readers Freddie. So are you employed in the biz or as they say "in between careers" right now?

 

I'm not trying to insult the readers. I'm saying they are morons if they purchase a paper when it's available for free online. A nicer way to put it is they would be foolish to purchase a paper when it's available for free online. I'll go back and edit out the word morons since you deemed it too harsh.

 

I buy a paper occasionally. I may be an idiot sometimes, but I like to sit and read the metro paper when I'm eating at the local diner during my lunch break. I have no problem plunking down the 50 cents a few times a week.

 

Do any of you know how much revenue is produced by your Web site?

You all seem to be experts, I was just checking.

 

at one of my earlier stops, they were getting $25 per 1,000 impressions per banner ad. that works out to 2.5 cents per story.

if a paper gets 100,000 hits per day with two ads per page, that's $5,000 per day in ad revenue. before expenses for accommodating those ads.

 

when did you get so smart, dog? shit. i almost had to pull out a calculator.

 

I wouldn't classify this as evidence, per say, but I work in a small community, and it seems as if everyone knows me. Whenever I'm out in public, people are always chatting me up and wanting to know my opinion on sports. And I'm frequently told they wish I would right something on the pro and major college teams in my area. I basically have to tell them that I can't because I don't "cover" them and am not in the locker room everyday.

BUT, they still want to know my OPINION on those teams. So gamers? No. Columns? Yes. But that can be hard to do when you're drowning in preps.

 

And I'm frequently told they wish I would right something on the pro and major college teams in my area.[/quote]

I hope you don't spell "write" like this all the time.

 

I hope you don't spell "write" like this all the time.
[/quote]

Haha Huck,

Nope, I don't. Only when I'm posting and trying to carry a conversation with four different people.

 

If you're someone who is interested in a lot of different areas of content in the paper (sports, local news, national, entertainment, etc.), it's probably still worth the miniscule cost (remember, we're talking about like 25 cents a day for home subscription) to have something you can hold in your hand and easily "navigate."

The people that are lost are the ones who aren't interested in a large segment of the newspaper's coverage to begin with. If all they care about is national news, cnn.com does the trick; or just sports, espn.com.