Maybe getting subscribers is not the only hard part. Last week, investment fund ValueAct announced that it had bought 7 per cent of the common stock of The New York Times Company.
Shares in the business, which publishes one of America’s best-known newspapers, are down around a third this year. But the stock price has almost doubled over the past five years. It now boasts more than 8mn digital subscribers. The venerable media group has done better than many competitors in coping with the switch online.
ValueAct is at the gentler end of the activist spectrum. Even so, it is less worried about how many users the NYT has accumulated than how much can be wrung out of them.