The New Yorker is still a small niche publication, despite its notoriety of excellence. While I'd love to read a high-standards technology review, I'm not sure there's an "opportunity" of sufficient size. I'll have to settle for The Economist's tech coverage until someone proves me wrong.
Sure, if you consider a million* subscriptions paying cash money every month "niche." I certainly wouldn't call a blog with a million paying customers "niche!" You could have a tenth of that and run a profitable website, with plenty of money to pay good writers.
Yea, that is pretty niche considering the size of their operation. Check out how far down the list they are and who's above them (US Weekly, Newsweek, Readers Digest, etc). Then there's the web: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/newyorker.com+techcrunch.co...
All that high quality content and the likes of TechCrunch are crushing them one "Twitter is down" post after another.
I don't see how that graph is interpreted as a "crushing" -- you may as well make a graph of the sales of Techcrunch's print edition, and see who wins then. The New Yorker could have flat zero web presence and I doubt it would make very much difference to their bottom line. They sell printed pieces of paper, not page views.
It's true that there are lots of other magazines which sell many more copies; I'm just suggesting that they appear to have a lot of headroom in terms of "having a big enough market to be a profitable business."
