At the PPA Festival, the NYT’s VP, global advertising, Tom Armstrong, gave a presentation — “Becoming more valuable to more people: how The New York Times is building long term success” — and, indeed, it was standing room only.
Here are some of the lessons I took away from his talk:
- Reader revenues are the future. Like almost everyone else in the late 90s, the NYT initially put all its content online and made it freely available. By 2011, it had realised that digital advertising alone would not sustain the business, so they erected a paywall. It was controversial at the time but the decision proved a turning point. They now have over 11m subscribers.
- Go digital-first. In 2014, it dawned on them that they were still a print operation with a digital component. They decided to flip that around and became a digital operation with a print component.
- Invest in journalism. Journalism is our product so we must invest heavily in it, they realised. “Make something worth paying for” became the mantra.
- Become a destination site and establish direct relationships with your users.
- Invest in the user experience. The NYT has focused on creating a beautiful and easily navigable site; pleasing on the eye and easy to use. They have made greater use of impactful photography, video and infographics. This focus on UX extends to the ads, where the NYT resolved to avoid the terrible ad experience so common on many news sites. Ads must complement the whole NYT experience, so they stopped pop-ups and instant-play videos and created new custom ad formats.
- Embrace new or alternative media and platforms, so as “to create new front doors into the NYT”. The NYT has enjoyed great success with podcasts: “The Daily” gets 55m downloads a month and they put out over 100 newsletters. Its flagship, “The Morning Newsletter”, goes out to 17m subscribers.
- Adopt a portfolio approach. With the aim of becoming essential and helping readers to make the most of their lives, the NYT has successfully expanded coverage into areas such as cooking, shopping, sports and gaming. This has been facilitated by some clever acquisitions, such as The Athletic and Wordle!
Armstrong didn’t pretend it had all been plain sailing — senior management experienced pushback at key moments, especially around the introduction of the paywall in 2011, but by relentlessly focusing on the customer and being clear-eyed about what was important, they are now reaping the rewards.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
