What is the cost to produce a page like this? Must be high, versus the cost of a normal article with inline images. I cannot imagine that the ROI is worth it. Therefore I think that this article format will disappear for economic reasons.
It had over 3.5 Million page views the first week. Estimates are that it took about three man-months to write and design the long article. But that was two years ago, and without any of the tools and experience they have now.
That's expensive, but napkin-calculations can be done:
Average yearly at NY Times according to Google is: $98 167
That means about $33 000 plus some taxes and costs for three monte, say, $50 000 then.
Can you sell one ad space in such an article at $50 000 / 3 500 000 = $14.29 per 1k impression?
NY Times sells ads at $6.29 for 1k impression on their sports pages. On the Snow Fall article three such ads would be enough to cover the estimated costs.
As a comparative note: A full page print ad costs $10 per estimated reader, it is possible that this Norway article is also published in the regular print, and will therefore recuperate some costs there as well.
I don't think so. If you look at theatre for comparison (which is also an act of storytelling), most plays are simple amateur pieces, that anybody with some skills and knowledge can put together. However there are also very expensive professional theaters that that sometimes tell the same stories as the amateurs for many thousands times the cost of the amateur pies. Yet expensive theatre is found in every major city.
To keep the analogy, NY-times is doing web-page stories Broadway-style. Perhaps they found an unexplored marked, perhaps it is too soon. But sooner or later, the art-form of story telling on the web is going to be taken to the next level done by professionals for a lot more money than any amateurs telling the same story.
You forget that sometimes we go to events and places not because of the places or events themselves, but for their image or the people we expect will also attend. The same doesn't work for the web.
I wondered about that too, but after hearing a talk by one of the lead tech dudes involved with The Guardian and the like, and after seeing some of the 'frameworks' that are popping up specifically for this purpose (Ractive.js comes to mind), I think that even after an initial 'slump', we'll start seeing more and more of this kind of stuff.
In fact, I'm betting on it by trying to find a market for being the creator of things like this. I haven't gotten started yet, but it's at the top of my 'business opportunities' list. I think I mostly just need to find someone who is good at visualizing data, or dive into that myself.
I can see Mike Bostock among the creators - D3 creator can definitely accomlish a great feat in short time! His data visualisation/storytelling skills are just amazing!
