The Final Days of the New York Times

(MoneyWatch)  For a couple days now, I've been puzzling over how to evaluate a report entitled "Size Doesn't Matter" conducted by a research company called ContentNext (which is the publisher of paidContent) that was summarized in AdAge on Tuesday. This report covered everything from the Drudge Report to The New York Times and Google News.

My colleague Catharine Taylor wrote about the report in depth on Tuesday -- please check her post out to learn more.

The report's conclusions? Small, independent news operations can be profitable. Okay, I buy that. But what about big companies? The report says the Times will be profitable as an online-only publication once it achieves 1.3 billion page views a month.

That should be easy, right?

Well, consider that today, the Times can count on about 173 million PVs per month. So let's do the math. All The New York Times needs to do is grow its online audience by a bit less than an order of magnitude -- fast.

Give me a break. I've been working inside web-based content companies since 1995, and I hate to be the one to tell you this, but that simply ain't gonna be happening -- not in the time-frame required to save the Times in any kind of recognizable form that we know today.

I'll spare you any further fiction from this particular report, except to note that its author says that since Yahoo, AOL and Google already enjoy sustained traffic in the billions of PVs per month, it may be possible for media companies to achieve those lofty numbers as well.

Not. So, let's rename this report: "Size Matters." (As long as the size is small.) The atomization of media is well underway. Huge organizations appear to be doomed, but the individual blogger may have a future, if (s) he can attain just a modest bit of scale. So, the implication of this AdAge report is that a lot of little guys may make it, but you can kiss the large news organizations of the past a long goodbye.

BTW, today, the Times was trading at $6.66/share the last time I checked today, yielding a market cap of under a billion dollars. No word on whether a buyer has been found for its headquarters building in Manhattan, but commercial real estate experts tell me that no one is putting a building like that one on the market these days unless they are absolutely desperate to find cash to pay off debts that are coming due.

That would be a company like the Times.

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