If you are a competent tech company, you hire data scientists to analyze everything. Fortunately you also have data on everything. Are you at Amazon? Maybe you run price experiements and map out demand curves. Are you at Google? You probably A/B test effects of ranking changes.
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Twitter? Maybe you look at how changing the size of of the like button by two pixels affects engagement. There are lots of ways to measure these effects, and there is a deep art to it, but everything gets measured and product decisions are made based on these measurements.
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I don't see any way that fine-grained behavior like this doesn't change what gets published or emphasized. NYT has 6M subscribers and, probably (I have no idea), ten or thirty times as many daily visitors. That is /absolutely/ sufficient to run all sorts of exciting tests.
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I absolutely believe them that their ad revenue is shit and they're shifting to a subscription-based model. This in no way suggests that they're not biased in their reporting. Suppose I were a data scientist at NYT. I have no idea what their data are like, but I can imagine.
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Live events are hilarious to me (prestige laundering), and optioning I know little about; let's focus on subscriptions. It's most amenable to analytic exploitation.
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Here are some questions I would ask immediately if they were paying me. 1. What sort of articles do people read immediately before subscribing? 2. Unsubscribing? (Complicated by the absolute shit process of unsubbing) 3. How does article ordering affect p(subscription)?
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That's it. I would be shocked if they didn't have well-developed subscription/unsubscription attribution models that mapped subs/unsubs to articles, which may be easily classified by topic. Why else would you be hiring multiple data engineers?pic.twitter.com/twOuwYbzny
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If you think editors don't steer coverage on the basis of what is likely to generate revenue, I am so sorry for the loss of your naivete, but media companies are businesses and if they money they go under and managers lose their jobs or at least don't get promoted
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Strictly speaking: maybe it's not as revenue (although also be real, my god it's a company it will take any revenue it can get and this too is measured and optimized) But it doesn't matter Incentives to shape coverage are the same and none of these people are to be trusted.
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