3 ms·

The NYT is just can't shake the negative influence of their printing legacy with respect to their strategy. The article quotes them as saying "Our future is mu

The NYT is just can't shake the negative influence of their printing legacy with respect to their strategy. The article quotes them as saying "Our future is much more digital than print". Are you kidding me, they still have to say things like this? Of course the $1B in non-digital revenue is important and needs a steady hand to maximize it's contribution. However their digital strategies have been so simplistic, so old fashioned, they just can't seem to catch up to what they really need to do.

spyspy 10y ago
And what do they really need to do?
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  For starters, the leadership has very little experience in innovating with tech product or business models. http://nytco.com/executives http://nytco.com/executives. Another example is they claim reader engagement is important yet have made almost no progress on this front. Most articles don't even allow community comments. Rather than complaining about the quality of internet comments, they could use their influence to embrace new techniques that raise the bar for discourse. Their selling of subscriptions is a mess. First the cheapest sub is $200/yr. They need to segment further and offer something at the psychologically important barrier of $9.95/month. This new tier could be made compelling with cannibalizing higher tiers. The sell screen is a mess: https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8RX3Y.html https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8RX3Y.h.... It's confusing, not clean, has unnecessary messaging, and looks like it's never been through iterations of A/B testing to maximize conversions. There are many more opportunities for improvement that are also not being taken up on. I wish I could meet with them for a couple days of strategy consulting.
mratzloff 10y ago
Can you describe what you mean by simplistic and old fashioned in more detail?

spyspy 10y ago

And what do they really need to do?

WhitneyLand 10y ago
For starters, the leadership has very little experience in innovating with tech product or business models. http://nytco.com/executives http://nytco.com/executives. Another example is they claim reader engagement is important yet have made almost no progress on this front. Most articles don't even allow community comments. Rather than complaining about the quality of internet comments, they could use their influence to embrace new techniques that raise the bar for discourse. Their selling of subscriptions is a mess. First the cheapest sub is $200/yr. They need to segment further and offer something at the psychologically important barrier of $9.95/month. This new tier could be made compelling with cannibalizing higher tiers. The sell screen is a mess: https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8RX3Y.html https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8RX3Y.h.... It's confusing, not clean, has unnecessary messaging, and looks like it's never been through iterations of A/B testing to maximize conversions. There are many more opportunities for improvement that are also not being taken up on. I wish I could meet with them for a couple days of strategy consulting.

mratzloff 10y ago

Can you describe what you mean by simplistic and old fashioned in more detail?