Maybe they would have done better on their own, but I was much happier to see them get swallowed by the NYT rather than a site like the Huffington Post, where the association would lose them much more goodwill.
The things that annoy me with the NYT are the monthly article limit that I have to workaround and how painfully slow 538 is on my iPhone.
Yeah, it's such a terrible limitation too when all you need to do is remove the variable, and it goes back to normal. I wonder how many customers that inconvenience actually gets for the NYT?
Regardless, they've landed more than 500k digital subscribers in the past 18 months. I'm sure there are a number of things at play here (bundling home delivery and digital, including app subs in these numbers, etc), but that's still pretty impressive.
The things that annoy me with the NYT are the monthly article limit that I have to workaround and how painfully slow 538 is on my iPhone.