My mom delivers papers for the New York Times. The pay is garbage but she is old and getting Social Security. She likes to drive around and people-watch. She is also on the route that mostly delivers to Starbucks, Safeway, the airport, 7/11, and Albertsons. It is the best route since you just drop 20 papers on the doorstep of a Starbucks.

She delivers about 500 papers a night. And she is just one of the 20+ drivers in our city of 180K people.

So people do still buy them.

I buy the NYT from retail when I have the time and leisure to sit and read a newspaper. I like the fact that you can be in fairly provincial settings (small towns, etc.) but if there is a starbucks, the NYT will be for sale ...

I note that it is frequently sold out at those starbucks locations (after lunch, at least) so it appears that others buy them there as well.

FWIW, I am a sunday-only print version subscriber.

Their total print circulation is 2.1 million. [1] I always discount digital head counts since they can be grossly inflated with complete plausible deniability. And even when done well, it's probably accurate to do things like count somebody clicking on a single clickbait headline and then immediately leaving as a 'monthly reader' which creates a sort of dissonance between what we think of as monthly reader and what it actually means.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_by_circulat...

OT: how did you strike through? Not described in the formatdoc ... [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

This site will generate various Unicode versions of text - struck-through, bold, italic, bubble, all caps, script, Franktur and more:

https://yaytext.com/

It's in Unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strikethrough#Unicode

These numbers are usually completely off. There is no standard basis or reliable determination for them, and it's in every publishers interests to quote as high as they can get away with.

Buying traffic from cheap ads can easily get you millions of "readers" who just hit the page from various IPs and leave some cookies around.

That's not true. Basically all periodicals' circulation numbers are independently audited, because nobody will buy ads from them without an audited figure. Only the very smallest fly-by-night publications self-audit.

Readers != circulation. Many hotels, coffee shops, airports, libraries, offices, and hundreds of other business subscribe, but it has nothing to do with who actually reads anything.

Also that number is mostly quoting digital viewers, which are not audited at all.