• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, April 8, 2010

How much is The New York Times' iPad content worth to advertisers? Quite a bit -- but at the same time, not enough.

That's judging by the exclusive sponsorship deal struck by Chase and the NYT, which has the banking giant paying $1 million to be the sole sponsor for the launch of the paper's forthcoming iPad app.

The marquee sponsorship spot is being used by Chase to advertise its new Sapphire rewards credit cards. The deal will last three to six months and could be renewed if it proves a success, according to Rory Maher, a research analyst with TBI. NYT really knows how many digital subscriptions the paper will sell over the iPad. Looking to earlier examples, the NYT sold subscriptions to about one of every 10 consumers who bought Amazon's first Kindle device. Assuming that it achieves similar penetration with iPad buyers, that would suggest 60,000 NYT subscriptions sold to date.

On the other hand, Maher points out that $1 million is peanuts to a big publisher like NYTCO. The figure represents about 0.03% of total revenues of $3.4 billion in 2005, and 0.04% of total revenues of $2.4 billion in 2009.