Mark Armstrong

What other ways can we start looking at what websites are and how they perform? Well, pay rate, sure (though try prying that number out of anyone).

Then there’s traffic versus site income, certainly. Take the HuffPo again—that’s $30 million this year, they say, and they were reporting 26 million uniques via comScore back in March, so let’s just totally ballpark it and say they did 312 million uniques this year. That puts their income at just about 1:10 with readers. Fascinating!

Don’t compare that to print, by the way: the print edition of the New York Times has, very roughly, just a million subscribers. How tiny and quaint, you think? Well, the news division of the Times Co. alone takes in—mostly from the print product—somewhere around $150 million… each month.