[Y-bar]

NY Times did an even longer and more advanced article like this a while ago called "Snow Fall: The avalanche at Tunnel Creek" (http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...)

It had over 3.5 Million page views the first week. Estimates are that it took about three man-months to write and design the long article. But that was two years ago, and without any of the tools and experience they have now.

That's expensive, but napkin-calculations can be done:

Average yearly at NY Times according to Google is: $98 167 That means about $33 000 plus some taxes and costs for three monte, say, $50 000 then.

Can you sell one ad space in such an article at $50 000 / 3 500 000 = $14.29 per 1k impression?

NY Times sells ads at $6.29 for 1k impression on their sports pages. On the Snow Fall article three such ads would be enough to cover the estimated costs.

As a comparative note: A full page print ad costs $10 per estimated reader, it is possible that this Norway article is also published in the regular print, and will therefore recuperate some costs there as well.

[dmix]

They've also done it plenty of times.

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/ http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/two-gunshots/ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/15/magazine/bad-p... http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/gun-country/ http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/the-jockey/ http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/tomato-can-blues/