On January 7, 2022, The New York Times announced the acquisition of sports news outlet The Athletic. The deal is valued at $550 million and is expected to be officially completed in Q1 2022.
The New York Times said in a statement that The Athletic will continue to operate as a standalone website after the acquisition is completed. According to statistics, as of December last year, The Athletic had 1.2 million subscribers worldwide and more than $60 million in annual subscription fee revenue.
The combination of the vertical king and the established media empire naturally makes people in the industry full of imagination. But before we hit a new spark, let's hear the story of a subscriber from The Athletic China.
Wen / Zheng Zhi
Editors / Li Luyuan, Yin Haonan
"The statistics generated during the game are not open to the fans, what is the difference between this and the two teams quietly finishing the game behind closed doors? After all, public interest in sports is the only cornerstone of professional sports."
This quote from Michael Lewis's classic book, The Magic Ball (also translated as "penalty ball into gold"), is undoubtedly a groundbreaking nonsense in the eyes of the "old antiques" who dominated the American baseball world in the last century. And now for slightly more senior sports fans, the first time after the game to get fresh, real-time statistics, has long been the basic operation, if it is a heavy football content consumer like me, in addition to the 90 minutes of technical and tactical itself, financial business, fan culture, history and humanities have also become the game, extremely eager content.
With the principle of not being stingy about paying for great content, I became one of the few domestic subscribers to The Athletic. Although the annual subscription fee has risen from less than $60 to $72 (priced at $7.99 per month), the dizzying list of exclusive in-depth articles still feels like great value for money.
For the development path of TA, which is temporarily unique in the market, "high-quality sports vertical self-media", it is naturally full of imagination. Therefore, when the negotiations for the acquisition of TA by the New York Times are finalized, I naturally look forward to what kind of sparks can be sparked by the kings of vertical fields and the established media empire.
01
Acquisition of TA, not only for the current "small goal"
On January 7, Beijing time, the New York Times announced the acquisition of sports news media The Athletic.
The deal was finalized for $550 million, which is significantly lower than the approximately $700 million he once proposed, but that amount is the highest in the history of the Parent Company of the New York Times, whose biggest acquisition was the Boston Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion, and the company bought the most "ashes" legendary website in the United States for $410 million About.com.
However, whether it is the acquisition of friendly media or "touching the net", the New York Times's experience is not very good, and both acquisitions ended in failure, and eventually had to sell below the cost price. It also made them more cautious in their later acquisition process.
Now with ambitions to win TAs without ads and relying entirely on subscription revenue, the industry generally believes that this move can strengthen the New York Times' appeal to subscribers.
According to publicly available data, the New York Times had more than 8.4 million subscribers by the third quarter of last year, while as of December, ta's subscribers had reached 1.2 million. If simply and crudely calculated in a non-weightless way, these two numbers add up to bring the New York Times infinitely closer to its goal of breaking through 10 million subscribers in 2025.
In the larger industry context, the New York Times is the first newspaper in traditional media to transform and realize that paid subscription revenue exceeds traditional advertising revenue.
In the past few years, perhaps because of the "national misfortune poet luck", the newspaper has ushered in a sharp increase in subscribers during the Trump administration with excellent political reporting; and in 2021, when American political enthusiasm has faded slightly, they have maintained a steady increase in the number of users by relying on lifestyle content such as fashion, home, games, and cooking.
An interesting statistic is that, according to the Wall Street Journal, 30 percent of new Subscribers to the New York Times are designed for word-filling games and cooking guides, a trend that also reflects the content needs of a new generation of readers — after all, in 2015, users paid for word-filler games alone accounted for only 8% of the total number of users, and at that time, culinary websites did not have a fee.
In addition to the hard news of current politics that traditional print media are good at, the younger generation obviously needs more diversified, interest-oriented life content, and sports is the killer weapon that grabs the attention of young people, which is also the shortcoming of the previous New York Times.
Since you can't do it yourself, just buy one! From this point of view, the layout logic of the New York Times is clear and reasonable, and the goal is not in the current momentary gains and losses.
After all, according to their own calculations, TA will continue to generate losses in the next three years before it can be expected to turn a profit. In addition, the New York Times also said that TA will currently charge as a standalone subscription product, but ultimately hopes to integrate it into a holistic package of paid content packages to "bundle sales" users.
02
How TA reinvented my soccer content consumption
"I fell in love with football, just as I fell in love with women: suddenly, incomprehensibly, unexpectedly, without the slightest thought of the pain and collapse it could cause me." This is the classic opening of the famous British writer and Arsenal die-hard Nick Hornby's autobiographical novel "Extreme Fever".
Like most of my peers, my initiation of football came from the French summer of '98, and my impression deepened in Japan and South Korea in '02. At that time, everyone could only rely on local stations to ESPN's Premier League live broadcasts, CCTV football programs and various magazines and newspapers on book and newsstands to chase football matches, and it was Arsenal, the peak of mercury, that captured my heart.
Looking back now, the lack of information did not affect my enthusiasm for the sport, but with the development of the mobile Internet, the Chinese sports content that was readily available but became more and more homogeneous gradually bored me. Later, because of the departure of Van Persie, my interest in Arsenal also came to an end.
It wasn't until I went to Scotland to study that I found a new way to open up the world of football. In my spare time, I immersed myself in football and travel, visiting 73 stadiums in total, from semi-professional matches at the bottom of the league pyramid to Champions League matches, enjoying wading through the mountains and experiencing the wilderness of the countryside, and watching the showdowns in the stands crowded with die-hards.
I took a picture while watching in Scotland
For me in those years, football was split into two parts: "live football" and "football on TV". I voraciously breathed in "live football" almost every moment – the memories of conversation in bars, buses forming teams to go away, punching new villages and stadiums, and even cupping with players, rekindled my passion for football. But at the same time, it also made me gradually move away from "football on TV".
Although for me who was in the UK at the time, Arsenal, Manchester City and even Real Madrid were actually close geographically close, but the distance mainly came from the psychological level. After all, there is no life in London and Manchester, and the joys and sorrows of local fans cannot breathe together, and the wonderful skills of the giants are not as exciting as the derby battles in neighboring villages.
It was then that I had a deep understanding that football not only provided 90 minutes of entertainment, but more importantly, it provided opportunities for people to connect with each other as a shared culture of society. So on the one hand, I was enjoying the village competitions with twenty or thirty spectators, and on the other hand, I didn't know who the Champions League and Champions League winners were, and this state continued until I subscribed to TA.
When I first learned about this website, it was also because several football reporters who followed on Twitter have joined one after another, so I opened a 30-day free trial with the attitude of trying it out, and since then I have been out of control. As I read in-depth article after article, I gradually began to regain interest in "football on TV", picking up the Premier League, Champions League and even Championship matches, although I did not have the "flesh and blood connection" with these teams in the Scottish League.
Author's list of authors in TA's attention
Sometimes, a good tactical analysis or financial manuscript can get readers interested in how a club works (such as Brentford's amazing operating efficiency), while a good character story (such as the Bundesliga journalist Honigstein's Klopp) can make more people pay attention to the process of building a team outside of the game.
It is precisely under the connection of these articles that the 90-minute game is no longer just a running, tackling, and shooting for every participant, but also a dynamic game played by flesh and blood people. At the same time, you will also find that from the fan culture on the sidelines to the operational ideas at the top of the club, there is something worth savoring.
At least on a personal level, the long-term cultivation of the industry's famous people has given me a fuller understanding of football, and from a higher and more comprehensive dimension, appreciating the game has become more flavorful. The value of this in-depth content undoubtedly far exceeds that of any free fragmented sports content that is at your fingertips.
TA official website page
From the interface experience, the whole process of Ad-free TA typesetting is very refreshing; more importantly, by paying attention to the data of the three dimensions of team, league and author, TA can also achieve the front-end recommendation of "thousands of faces", so that each reader's homepage and feed stream are very much in line with their own tastes. And these authors also often reply to comments in the comment area of the article, coupled with pre-game and post-game discussions, making them also full of community attributes.
As a Chengdu fan, I was very impressed by an unexpected topic from TA. In the summer of 2019, the news of Sheffield United's return to the Premier League caused ripples in the nostalgic Chengdu fan circle, coupled with the legendary story of head coach Wilder and the presence of Scottish players in the team, let me pay no hesitation to pay attention to this team on TA.
One night, when I refreshed the feed stream, I was caught by the word "Chengdu". This article talks about the experience of Chengdu Sheffield United from the establishment of the team to the demise, and opened my memories that have been sealed for many years.
More importantly, the article is not only informative, but also recalls the investment decisions of that year and various observations on the overall environment of Chinese football from the perspective of British investors. The so-called "bystander Qing", such a third-party perspective input allows us who were once "in the bureau" to reflect more soberly on the past, and also reflects the breadth and depth of the subject matter touched by TA.
03
"National Local Newspaper"
Similar to HSBC's famous slogan, "Be the local bank of the world", TA has always had the vision of being a "local newspaper (sports edition) in the United States", and later TA's business even expanded to many countries in Europe and the United States.
It is worth mentioning that in 2017, when Alex Mather, one of the founders of TA, was interviewed by the New York Times, he did not hesitate to put out a bold statement, "When you finish reading this article, maybe TA has recruited a well-known sports writer under your local newspaper." If such a strong poaching continues for a few more years, the sports sections of many local newspapers can be closed."
In a subsequent interview in San Francisco, he reaffirmed his conviction, "We will crush local newspapers with a war of attrition, so that they will continue to lose blood and die; we are poaching good and capable sports journalists every moment, so that the business model of local print media can be completely bankrupt."
Ta's two founders, Alex Mather on the left
The iron-blooded, grim speech made Mathematicr a major enemy of the American media scene, but in my opinion, he only exposed the essence of one thing — that his most immediate competitors may not be ESPN or Yahoo Sports, but the sports section of local newspapers.
Not only because an adversary like ESPN is an "asset-heavy route" with copyright resources in hand, but also because the audiences of the two may not overlap very much. ESPN is produced by the "Central Kitchen" assembly line, with the goal of giving the top giants and matches to the audience; TA actually aggregates the "fly house" cuisine with rich regional characteristics to meet the "unique taste" of discerning diners.
The Nieman News Lab makes an interesting point: Suppose there are about 100,000 loyal sports fans in Chicago City who might subscribe to local newspapers to follow the team; while there are about 100,000 die-hards in other regions who support Chicago-area teams, and there are few products in the current media market that serve this segment of the population. Once he can pocket the best sports writers in the Chicago area, the 200,000 heavy users who are willing to pay for it may pay for it.
How hard it is to do sports pages in local newspapers, it just so happens that I have experienced it in China. During Euro 2016, I worked part-time in the sports department of a local metropolis newspaper, whose news brand ranked among the best in China, and the sports department also hid many good players with strong business capabilities.
However, the newspaper's assessment and remuneration method at that time was very unfavorable to sports journalists. Because the vast majority of users of client and social media accounts are residents of the city, the demand for current politics and local life content is far greater than that of film and television, sports and other vertical categories, coupled with the local team's years away from the top domestic leagues, the attention of fans has dropped sharply, except for the occasional interview with Lippi, the newspaper's sports article traffic is difficult to rank high.
As a result, many of the best sports journalists have moved elsewhere, and the space left for sports has shrunk again and again.
On the one hand, sports journalists in local newspapers have a hard time surviving, and on the other hand, they have irreplaceable and unique value for local fans. A journalist who has been with the team for many years not only has a unique advantage in obtaining information, but also has a deep understanding of the local fan culture, sports atmosphere, political and business environment, and his contacts and experience can be transformed into in-depth content "exclusively customized" for the fans of the team.
Ta's model is equivalent to bringing together the "personalized needs" of hundreds of team die-hards and hugging them together.
04
Postscript: The survival of excellent vertical content
After the acquisition, I paid special attention to the profit and loss of the TA. According to CNBC sources, TA will have revenue of about $65 million in 2021 (including subscription fee revenue of more than $60 million) and a loss of about $55 million. Founder Mathematicr said that TA's revenue has "made the editorial department profitable", in other words, including marketing, HR, servers and other investments are still loss-making.
TA has previously had a "scandal" with Amazon and has also cooperated with T-Mobile to become pre-installed software for its mobile phone products. In addition, they have also reported mergers with lottery player DraftKings, as well as cooking and lifestyle websites. Either it is included in the giant or bundled with the vertical media of other categories, which seems to have become the most popular survival law of vertical media at present.
Although the current profitability of vertical content is not good, its future imagination space is not narrow.
Today, the Internet content ecology should enter a "focus" stage, everyone cares about the social current politics naturally not to worry about content supply, but if you want to further seize user interest, improve stickiness and use time, high-quality content in vertical fields is the final destination.
How vertical media can continue to produce high-quality content on the one hand, and fully tap the "long-tail demand" that exists in the market, is worthy of deep consideration by the industry.
The Athletic official website link:
https://theathletic.com
(End of full text)