New York Times to New Media: WHO Doesn’t Understand How the Internet Works?
Old media is everyone’s favorite punching bag, especially those that believe paid content on the Web is anti-American.
Mike Masnick trots out his favorite old media accusations against old fogies at the old gray lady, offering ”THEY are still a decade behind the rest of US” because THEY just don’t ”seem to understand the basic workings of the Internet.”
Masnick apparently has the defintive handle on “how the Internet works” and is incredulous that the New York Times stubbornly refuses to play by the rules, OUR Internet rules.
The latest NYT Internet faux pas, in Masnick’s play book: “My Times” on NYTimes.com, where “readers can create their own personlaized Web pages.” Masnick concludes his well-researched, detailed, insightful, analytical post– 4 sentences long–with the helpful:
it seems that the people figuring out the company’s digital strategy need to update themselves to the curent decade.
Really? President and CEO Janet Robinson seems to be a thoroughly modern woman AND she has good stats, digital ones.
Robinson to the Newspaper Association of America in June 2007 (sorry, more than 4 sentences!):
As the advertising market has changed, so has our approach to selling. With an integrated print and digital sales staff leveraging our R&D capabilities, we are able to develop robust integrated and creative programs that result in meaningful incremental spending in Times products. An example is our leadership position in mobile. While the marketplace for mobile advertising is still young, The Times leveraged our Mobile.NYTimes.com site with Microsoft, providing it with sponsorship of the site. We went on to provide cross-promotional opportunities with our other larger products, including NYTimes.com and the newspaper. So while many companies struggle to monetize the still nascent technologies of mobile, we were able to build a multi-million-dollar program leveraging the interest in mobile across our entire portfolio.
“How do we plan to grow our digital businesses?” It is a very important question and one that we are devoting a great deal of time to, and it is an area where we are deploying multiple approaches to fully capture the growth potential.
When we presented at this conference last year, we estimated that we would generate $250 million in digital revenues in 2006. This projection proved to be too conservative. In fact, we recorded approximately $275 million in digital revenues. Last year at this time, about 7.5 percent of our revenues came from our digital properties. To date in 2007, nearly 10 percent of our revenues are Internet-related.
Going into 2007, we anticipated that our online revenues would grow at a rate of 30 percent this year. Earlier this year when digital advertising slowed across the publishing industry, we revised our guidance. Nonetheless, we do believe that online revenues will still show strong growth this year and they are up 22 percent year to date May.
Currently the Times Company is the 11th largest audience aggregator on the Web, with 43.8 million visitors in May, up 11 percent from May of 2006. We expect to grow this audience through continued application of search engine optimization to expose our world-class content to search engines and other forms of Internet distribution, as well as new products.
A good example of this is our build out of NYTimes.com’s content areas. Last year we focused on developing our real estate, entertainment and travel sections and these verticals saw page view growth three times the site’s average. In 2007 we are focused on building out NYTimes.com’s verticals in business, health and technology. We are adding more features and functions to enrich our users’ experience, including multi-media, video and more user-generated content, and making them all easily searchable. We have also invested in video, personalization and community tools, and other features to attract new users and deepen engagement with existing users.
In order to leverage our very large audience into these content areas, we are investing in advanced analytics. This enables us to test different presentations of our content and page layout in order to deepen the engagement with our readers. It will also help us optimize both display and pay-per-click advertising placements.
We are also beginning to sell our entire digital audience, across all of our properties, in a coordinated fashion. This provides advertisers with greater reach, better targeting and the convenience of buying all the quality Web sites of the Times Company with one order, one invoice and one report.
And we are finding new ways to generate revenue from our sites through additional ad positions, listings and e-commerce.
YOU GO, JANET!
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