[News] The New York Times buys The Athletic for $550 million US

[edslunch]

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

Given the evil that is NYT, I will have to cancel my subscription. Oh well.

Principles are great and all, but can you really unentangle yourself from things you don’t like in the modern economy?

[herashak]

Bought the 12 months for $12 dollars deal. Lacking flames content but generally a solid site/mobile app. Looks like a Big tech valuation though for what they are

[schteve_d]

Originally Posted by herashak

Bought the 12 months for $12 dollars deal. Lacking flames content but generally a solid site/mobile app. Looks like a Big tech valuation though for what they are

Doesn't shift sideways on my phone to enlarge the test. Pisses me off. Otherwise I enjoy it. I'm old.

[VladtheImpaler]

Originally Posted by blender

You can tailor your feed to meet your own needs.
I only tune unto the Oilers coverage when they hit the skids.

I hate it when the hockey forum gets polluted with political views, so I would rather not. I will just say that NYT has less journalistic integrity than Pravda, as Pravda was at least honest.

[blender]

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

I hate it when the hockey forum gets polluted with political views, so I would rather not. I will just say that NYT has less journalistic integrity than Pravda, as Pravda was at least honest.

So you have a strong political opinion that you had no problem voicing in the hockey forum, yet when asked to explain you demur, citing your desire not to pollute the hockey forum with politics?

Just wanted to be clear.

[VladtheImpaler]

Originally Posted by blender

So you have a strong political opinion that you had no problem voicing in the hockey forum, yet when asked to explain you demur, citing your desire not to pollute the hockey forum with politics?

Just wanted to be clear.

Sure, whatever. Internet credit point for you.

[blender]

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

Sure, whatever. Internet credit point for you.

Lol. All good. I didn't mean to sound so snarky, just bemused, I guess.

[powderjunkie]

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

I hate it when the hockey forum gets polluted with political views, so I would rather not. I will just say that NYT has less journalistic integrity than Pravda, as Pravda was at least honest.

[Cecil Terwilliger]

After watching the Janet Jackson Nipplegate doc on Crave, I’m with Vlad. #### the NYT. Jesus Christ what a craptacular doc that was.

[Stampede2TheCup]

Originally Posted by dustygoon

Sorry guys. I was writing fast. But ya....software businesses with subscription models have sticky revenues => once someone subscribes, they rarely cancel even in economic downturns. That is extremely valuable (more so than the old license model). So their stocks trade at very high multiples of that revenue stream rather than profit....many SaaS companies don't make profit except for the bigger older ones like adobe....and they don't care because the market has agreed that revenue is the key metric. Anyway....$550m for the athletic which generates $75m of revenues is ~7x value/revs. That's getting close to the kind of value that software companies with sticky revenues trade at. I just don't believe the athletic's subscribers are that resilient.

Thanks, some of this further information was helpful to me. However, don’t you think looking at The Athletic as a stand-alone is too narrow of a view? I can see why the NYT sees the value.

The NYT owns publications specializing in a fairly broad range of subjects. They didn’t have any sports coverage like this so maybe it was important to them to fill that hole? If the NYT offers The Athletic as part of a bundle of subscriptions, then that would certainly help the stickiness of subscriptions as well as add some people who subscribe to it as part of a bundle but not on its own.

I am still a bit surprised at how high of a price the Athletic fetched, but the Athletic went and took a lot of the top writers. If the NYT wanted to start a similar sports-only publication instead of buying the Athletic, they’d be competing with The Athletic (or it’s new owners) instead of having a stranglehold on this kind of coverage for a while. Instead, now they can become the de-facto publication like this and use their clout to keep it that way.

Besides that, I still think online news subscriptions are still growing and evolving and by all accounts The Athletic was burning their cash by rapidly expanding. I would think they still have a lot of room for growing their subscriber base and also making more subscriptions stick as they add more sports coverage worldwide and develop markets they’ve newly expanded into.

[Jiri Hrdina]

Originally Posted by Cecil Terwilliger

After watching the Janet Jackson Nipplegate doc on Crave, I’m with Vlad. #### the NYT. Jesus Christ what a craptacular doc that was.

Why would you even choose to watch that?

[ricardodw]

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

Given the evil that is NYT, I will have to cancel my subscription. Oh well.

NYT is pretty much the Democratic Party News agency. The socialist sports are Soccer and NBA.

As far as ranking the sports that are important to the deplorables the NHL would be behind NASCAR.

There won't be better NHL coverage in the NYT Athletic and the NYT subscription on its own has very limited value.

[Strange Brew]

Originally Posted by Jiri Hrdina

Why would you even choose to watch that?

And what am I missing, why would a "craptacular" documentary about Janet Jackson define your view of the New York Times?

[Jiri Hrdina]

Originally Posted by Strange Brew

And what am I missing, why would a "craptacular" documentary about Janet Jackson define your view of the New York Times?

Exactly.
I actually stumbled across the doc last night too and watched about 30 seconds concluded 'well this is just terrible' and moved on.

[jayswin]

Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler

Given the evil that is NYT, I will have to cancel my subscription. Oh well.

Originally Posted by ricardodw

NYT is pretty much the Democratic Party News agency. The socialist sports are Soccer and NBA.

As far as ranking the sports that are important to the deplorables the NHL would be behind NASCAR.

There won't be better NHL coverage in the NYT Athletic and the NYT subscription on its own has very limited value.

Lol at you guys. Like jesus.

[Cecil Terwilliger]

Originally Posted by Jiri Hrdina

Why would you even choose to watch that?

It was only an hour and I thought it might be an interesting look back at the media firestorm, Prudish US culture and a neat look at how a media firestorm can arise out of a relatively minor event. Kinda like the Woodstock 99 or Alannis docs they’ve been on recently, except this was a different series called NYT Presents.

Instead it was a 25 minutes Janet bio which was pointless and then a 30 minutes media bashing because JT stayed famous and she faded off into obscurity. It had nothing insightful to offer except to label the media as racist and misogynistic but didn’t spend a single second examining the deeper problems in US culture and the hypocrisy.

At one point they unironically showed a picture of lil Kim’s infamous boob star outfit while talking about how any black woman who dressed provocatively was gonna be brought down by the white media. Except lil Kim wore that outfit a full 5 years prior, albeit to the MTV VMAs and she didn’t get cancelled by racist media, she got way more famous.

Then I watched another doc on Russell Simmons being a rapist. He’s gross and I felt gross. I hope he dies a horrible, horrible death.

Crave/HBO has a lot of documentary content and I watch most of it. It’s usually very good.