Scale or revenues for NYT?

Roy Greenslade tells us (via Followthemedia) that the New York Times is once more mulling over that hoary old problem of scale versus revenues. The TimesSelect paywall brings in $10 million a year, but it is arguably keeping the next generation of readers from finding the Times' best content.

TimesSelect generated $9.9 million in revenues in 2006, although this figure isn't necessarily helpful in understanding the online situation: 66% of the 609,000 subscribers receive it as a benefit of their print edition home delivery, and only 34% take TimesSelect's online-only option. What does a TimesSelect subscriber get for their money? Here's the list - discounting  the limited archive access and the email alerts for simplicity, it's basically access to the op-ed and news columnists.  Eight of the former, fifteen of the latter, or a total of twenty-three writers.

34% of $9.9 million is $3.4 million. So - back of a cigarette packet time - those columnists are generating average online revenues a shade under $150,000 each. Only last week I was thinking about how content businesses might remunerate writers on a performance basis (and Ron Davison said in comments that "whoever breaks the code on these kinds of new, increasingly typical labor markets is likely to find themselves inventor of a new form of company", which is spot on).

Seems to me the New York Times has two problems here, not one. Scale or revenues is the first - they're already thinking about that. The second is how to stop their best writers taking the Om Malik/Rafat Ali/Dan Gillmor (etc) route and just setting up on their own. We know Thomas Friedman (whose "world is flat" thesis I may not agree with but greatly admire) hates having his words behind the paywall because he says so in public (MediaBistro). Possibly he's not alone. It's reasonably straightforward for the TimesSelect columnists to work out what they're generating in revenues for NYT, and therefore get a feel for the risks and rewards they might see as independent bloggers.

This isn't just a question about future-proofing for the New York Times. This is about futureproofing for their columnists too. The experiment in charging for access has been a valuable one, but it appears to me that it creates more problems than it solves. If the Times doesn't open up the paywall, I predict their problem isn't only going to be keeping the next generation of readers but keeping the writers who want to talk to them.