Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Totally. I think it gets back to literally—as we told in the history, baked into the immutable mission of the trust and the company—to continue to serve as an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, free of ulterior influence, and unselfishly devoted to public welfare. As a news organization, that is what they are. That is undeniable. Right. That’s the bear case side of them being a tech company. Sure, they’ve adapted well and they certainly have been more tech-, Internet-, mobile-, growth–forward than any other news organization, and they’ve undergone, I hate to use this phrase but it literally applies to your digital transformation. They’re not a tech company and they have systematic things holding them back from behaving like a startup. Another bear case to make is that while subscribers are up—we’ve talked a lot about their subscriber numbers—we haven’t been talking about or nearly as much about their subscriber revenue because it is not growing as fast. In fact, their revenue per subscriber is going down. If you hear them talk on earnings calls, they assert things, like we’ll actually start increasing it again by the second half of 2021. They’ll say things, like those are promotional discounts that we use to get people in, and once they turn into second-, third-, fourth-year paying Times subscribers you’ll see that start to meaningfully change. We don’t know if that’s true yet. It’s very plausible, but right now revenue definitely is not tracking subscriber growth. It’s interesting. That’s the tried-and-true, old school newspaper tactic of subscribe to the local newspaper for X price for the first year, and then get them all raised—…

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