Will the last person leaving the Washington Post offices please turn out the lights?
With web views down by almost ⅔ since 2020, and ¼ million subscriptions canceled since Jeff Bezos ordered the paper not to make an endorsement for President this year, it's looking grim.
If Elon were not running Ecch (Twitter) into the ground, we would making jokes about Jeff Bezos.
Newspapers across the country have experienced a drop in website traffic and circulation since Donald Trump left office, but the declines at the Washington Post have been especially painful.
Post website traffic took a nosedive from about 140 million visits in April 2020, dropping pretty steadily to now less than 55 million, according to the most recent numbers obtained by City Paper, which are not published on the Post’s site. That’s a 60 percent drop in just a few years.
The decrease was so precipitous that the Post stopped sharing highlights of its web traffic with the public. A tab on the Post site that reads Audience & Traffic was updated consistently for several years. But about 15 months ago, the paper stopped disclosing those figures.
In the 11 years since Jeff Bezos bought the Post, he has said little publicly about his view of readership numbers, website traffic, or profitability generally. Current and former Posties often say that while Bezos’ wealth allows him to worry less about the bottom line than most corporations, he is also not obligated to run a charity.
His bottom line is how the WaPo serves his personal interest, which right now involves sucking up to Donald Trump.
………
It’s not just a decline in digital readers. Print circulation, the number of folks who buy the paper at a newsstand or have one delivered to their homes, has declined as well.
It's what happens when you make a concerted attempt to enshittify your product.
The paper seems determined to take the route of Boeing, and it ain't pretty.
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