Monday, August 05, 2019

The Snooze slouches further toward Gomorrah

At the Dallas Observer, Stephen Young has the details.

Yea, it made a $17M profit in the second quarter, but that's including the sale of the Belo Building and its nearly $26 million in closing net profit on that, on which it took a haircut from its initial asking price anyway. So the faux silver lining itself is actually leaden.

So really, it lost $11 million this quarter vs one year ago where it lost $500K. Ouch. Here's the actual report.

Other teh sucks, or other faux silver linings?

Yeah, it saved money on print costs.

That's because it prints fewer pages.

That's because it sells fewer ads.

Out here in the hinterlands, where they apparently just yank the biz section but don't re-letter the comix or other sections that come after that, it's bad. Tuesday, July 30? A 13.5 percent adhole on 30 pages. Thursday, Aug. 1? Slightly better, with a 15 percent adhole on the same number of pages.

Outside printing revenue dropped from no longer printing ... the Observer, among other things. Maybe the Belo Bunch worried that printers were reading Young and Jim Schutze more than their own paper?

The Snooze is also, according to Young, ditching its current content management system for the website and adopting that of the Washington Post, which reportedly allows more flexible paywalling. Not that I'm going to pay for it in general. (Circ revenue, despite the Snooze having a hard paywall [IIRC it was still somewhat leaky in 2Q 2018] dropped 5.1 percent.)

Supposedly, using Arc, in partnership with the Post, will give the Snooze more digital ads, too.

Even as digital ad prices continue to fall. (Ad revenue was down 1.8 percent.)

Wait, wait.

All these new ads will surely mean new business for Belo's digital marketing shop, which Bob Dechard will spin in some nutty new way.

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