I do see the value in publicly announcing things, but I do see newspapers as archaic.

The clerks at this court look at the scanned pages and confirm that yes they do say what the XML says, and then this gets published.

People can search for company histories, look at their bylaws, etc.

Similarly there's a different gov service for publishing corporate yearly financial reports.

Why isn't something like that for US states?

I think this is fairly common.

> After you get done publishing, the newspaper will provide an Affidavit of Publication, and you send that to the New York Division of Corporations with a Certificate of Publication that carries a $50 filing fee.

I live in NY but never filed an LLC, but I Google'd that. I can't believe such nonsense exists to get money in a state that already has high state / sales taxes.

Best argument I’ve heard is “gotta keep people employed somehow, can’t be too efficient”

1. Please ignore almost all the mail you get initially. There are public companies that troll NYS business registration logs and send TONS of false and highly misleading if not illegal advertisements. "You totally need this $900 OSHA poster you can just print for free and paste on the wall". "Ignore the fact we copied NYS' letterhead but aren't a governemnt entity", etc.

2. The NYS tax department will send you one real piece of mail as a questionnaire.

3. Yes, the newspaper requirement is real and fucking terrible. It's a very old holdover however politicians don't want to get rid of it because quite literally, it's a handout program for newspapers. It would make alot of "local" papers nobody reads, close up shops.

4. Shop around, there are a few ways to save money on it. Honestly, I made a LLC 2 years ago in NYS and haven't even used it business wise. I have yet to do the publicatinon requirement. You just can't legally do business until you do so BUT it doesn't give a deadline.

I think the idea is that anyone who the company owes money to can file a claim before any remaining funds are distributed.

Of course there are much better and more cost-effective ways of doing this (even pre-internet). It’s just absurd rent-seeking by unproductive leeches on the economy as far as I can tell.

They publish notice of all laws, all insolvencies, all changes of name, new holder of certain public offices etc. I don't think there is any news or anything beyond the UK.

I bet it would be 5x more if you had to take out an ad in the Times or Telegraph. :)

I wrote to my state assembly person; she wrote back saying A8125 was introduced to repeal the requirement, but no action taken. I would encourage you to write to your assembly person and senator, because this is just a drag on NY businesses.

Unfortunately the numbers are year specific.

Reading that as “one daily newspaper and one weekly newspaper”, that would be 6 (weeks) times at least (6 + 1) = 42 adverts in a newspaper (I can also read it as “2 public, one daily and one weekly”. That would increase the number of adverts). Price per advert would be about $25.

I guess most LLCs get incorporated in an at least somewhat large city, so the circulation of the paper will be somewhat high. $25 per advert then doesn’t sound that bad to me.

I know zilch of advertising prices, though, so let’s google it. Reading https://fitsmallbusiness.com/newspaper-advertising-costs/ (a link that google gave me, but that I don’t know the quality of), I see the price per “column inch” go down from about €18 to about €13 when you advertise more often.

⇒ it could well be that $1,000 is a fair price, giving the higher price you would have to pay and the amount of work you would have to do if you did it alone.

(Still seems a weird law, though. I can imagine that one should give people to object if your company will be noisy, stinky, or the like, but then, the city, IMO, should require a permit)

That likely still is true, but less so (fewer people subscribe to papers), and the assumption that people who read the paper would spot your advert probably only held back in the time when papers had reasonably small coverage (so that your advert wouldn’t appear in a large section of the paper, but stand on its own), and were about the only source of news (which made them much better read)