Can The New York Times Increase Page Views Sixfold? Doubtful.

(MoneyWatch)  ContentNext Media's researcher Lauren Rich Fine has finally answered a question that is at the core of The New York Times' dilemma: how many page views would nytimes.com need to garner as much ad revenue from the online version as from the print product?

The answer is six times as much as now. Yikes.

According to a story in Mediapost (another organization I write for), at the level of 1.3 billion page views, it would rival msnbc.com and Yahoo News in size, and be able, at a $25 cost per thousand, to make $300 million in ad revenue per quarter. (The Times is much closer to those sites in monthly unique visitors, at approximately half their size.)

But let's talk about content for a minute. It's true that MSNBC.com, Yahoo News and nytimes.com can all be classified as news sites, but it's somewhat like saying the Ford Focus and the Mercedes S-Class are both cars. Not only does the Times' have somewhat of a regional bent despite its national and international respect, but it also is, obviously, a more refined take on the news. As a content product, it isn't built for the kind of scale that those other sites are -- it's highly doubtful that you'd ever see the following headlines on the Times' home page: "Feds seize artifiacts from hit show 'Survivor'" (on today's Yahoo News), or "Barneycam: First Dog Tours White House" (on MSNBC.com). Scale, in this sense, means content that isn't quite as erudite, and therefore appeals to the masses the Times assiduously avoids.

As Fine's study points out, the Times has made strides lately to gain scale in other ways; notably by linking to outside content. It's doubtful that the Times' Web site will ever become a full-out news aggregator like Yahoo News, but it's a start. The strange thing is that the Times' Web site's biggest problem, in some regards, is that damn newspaper. Yahoo, for all its problems, doesn't have declining print revenues and print costs to offset, and MSNBC.com's siblings are in the TV business. Much of the declining revenue on network and cable is recession-related rather than business-model related. MSNBC.com can just tough it out. Would that the Times' could find stable additional revenue streams. Unfortunately, Obama memorabilia isn't a revenue stream for the long haul.