• The New York Times, Monday, December 29, 2014 3:29 PM

An article posted by the New York Times contends that Mark Thompson, CEO of the NYT, is on the “hot seat” in 2015 as “digital and print news providers face crushing pressure from so-called programmatic sales, which lowers the yield on advertising; [and from] the switch to mobile, which is harder to make money from.”

The NYT had a programmatic ad director, Matt Prohaska, for a short time, before “eliminating” the job in 2014.

“At The Times, more than half the revenue now comes from consumers, not advertisers, and fully half of the digital consumers arrive via mobile devices. But just 10 percent of digital advertising derives from mobile, a disconnect that will create big problems if it lingers,” the post continues.

“Although The Times’s metered model opened up a new source of revenue — there are now 875,000 digital-only subscribers — new lower-cost online-subscription approaches like NYT Now have not taken off as hoped. Mr. Thompson has the full confidence of the company’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., but declines in print advertising and circulation have created holes in revenue that a recent round of buyouts and layoffs can’t begin to fill. That very tough math will be squarely on Mr. Thompson’s desk in the coming year.”

Read the whole story at The New York Times »