Sports Illustrated is currently undergoing a potential demise, and that has left many questioning the future of journalism if a brand that strong can’t survive. 710 WOR host Mark Simone believes there’s a simple recipe for media success in 2024.
Simone argued that any media outlet attempting to create revenue solely from digital advertising is likely fighting a losing battle, during The Mark Simone Show Monday.
“A lot of people say that when they went to the internet, they didn’t do subscriptions. You got to have a subscription model. You can’t do it for free,” said Simone. “The problem is if you try to just be an internet magazine/newspaper, and try to make money off the ads, you can’t because when you go to the website to read the New York Post, or The New York Times or whatever, nobody ever clicks on the ads.
“You never look at the ads, you never click on them. You never do anything with the ads. So there’s no money in them and the advertisers all know this. There’s no money in ads on the websites. So the subscription model is the only thing that works.”
Mark Simone continued by predicting that both the New York Post and The New York Times will cease printing physical copies of their publications in the next 12 months.
“There’s a print edition of the New York Post. They still print that print edition, and that has about 80,000 people that read it. The website version has about three and a half million, and they’re all paying subscriptions,” said Simone. “So that’s where all the money is. It’s a similar ratio for all the other stuff. The New York Times and these print editions will all be gone in a year. They’re only printing right now for a handful of senior citizens who don’t know how to use the internet. So they’ll all be gone pretty soon.”
