> NYTimes is primarily ad supported, of course they were paid to publish it.
This is not true.
"The company said on Thursday that it added 157,000 net digital-only subscriptions in the fourth quarter of the year, pushing overall subscription revenue to more than $1 billion for the year. Subscription revenue now accounts for 60 percent of the company’s total revenue."
The book under review carries the imprint of William Morrow, which is a brand of HarperCollins, which is owned by News Corp, which was originally a Murdoch property. Another News Corp media property is the New York Post. So is the WSJ.
Which of these entities do you think paid the NYT to publish this review? Because that would be a major story.
Given that the vast majority of books are self published, if the NYT isn’t getting paid for reviews one would expect the vast of their reviews would be of self published books. Is this actually the case?
No, I wouldn’t expect that, as it’s much less likely that a reader of the NYT would be interested in a given self-published book than a traditionally published one. (The reason for that being that in order to be traditionally published, the book has to go through a process intended specifically to ensure that at least some significant segment of readers will likely enjoy it - while there is no such process for self-published books.)
Come on, this is incredibly obtuse. If the mean number of readers of a self-published book is 10, versus an average large-press book being 50K, which review do you publish?
Also, you shifted the argument. You asserted that "of course" someone paid the NYT to publish the review. Who did, and how did you discover this?
> If the mean number of readers of a self-published book is 10, versus an average large-press book being 50K, which review do you publish?
I don't get paid for writing my blog, and I've reviewed books that have probably only ever had ten readers. If they're really not getting paid either way then it shouldn't matter.
Articles that are paid content are marked as such. They run under the BrandStudio section. You can look at that content here: http://www.tbrandstudio.com
NYTimes is primarily ad supported, of course they were paid to publish it.