[lallysingh]

Well let's get into what NYT does: apps and widgets for several platforms, a separate paid "games" product, advertising backend, podcasts on separate apps, visualizations for key stories.. the list goes on. And at a very large scale.

NYT isn't comparable to The Guardian. It's subscription based so the news isn't enough. They have to add cooking, games, The Athletic, etc, across a ton of different apps, feeds, and presentations.

Games is solely a software product sold as a separate add-on subscription. It's almost certainly a profit center at the rates they charge.

[sonthonax]

I know they have a larger range of services, but are they 20x the breadth of services? Think of what other companies do with 600 tech people and compare what the profitability per employee should be at an tech organisation of such a scale.

[lallysingh]

Plenty of companies have more engineers for fewer products. Take any game studio, or the Photoshop team. What's your point? Do you have any comparable basis for comparison? The Guardian isn't one.

[sonthonax]

600 people on a median 200k salary in New York, when including taxes and obligatory benefits is about $150 million dollars a year just in payroll. This is an enormous spend. Unlike a game studio or a software company like Adobe, these people are all operational cost centres, they're not the bread and butter of the firm.

In a true software firm, more capital invested in headcount loosely means more features which is what drives sales. Here you can attribute a per employee profitability. When you hire more employees at a tech firm, the expectation is that you become more profitable.

At a non-tech company like a newspaper, technologists are a cost centre, you invest in technology in order to be more efficient, and hire as few people as possible.

Of course some technologists at the NYT will be profit centres. like those who work on advertising operations and games. But the NYT at its core is a news firm, it makes money on its influence and prestige which is driven by its journalism. Writers and content creators are the profit centres, everything else is a cost of doing business.

[lallysingh]

"true software firm" this outlook is 20 years out of date. Software is everywhere, and a major part of strategic advantage for companies in almost every industry.

NYT annual revenue is $2.47B (https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nyt/revenue/) with 5,900 employees. $150M/yr, 600 employees for their Tech headcount doesn't seem like a huge proportion.

Edit: Avg Revenue/Employee is $425,170