New York Times' new NYT Now mobile app will only carry native advertising, says CEO Mark Thompson
Native advertising will be the only form of advertising used in the New York Times’ new NYT Now app, which launches next week.
Product: The app launches on 2 April
CEO and president of the New York Times Company and former director-general of the BBC Mark Thompson unveiled the app at the Financial Times Digital Media Conference in London, and said it is the first of a new series of products to come. A new paid premium product and a cooking app will both launch in the coming months.
At $8 for four weeks’ access, the app costs around half of the lowest digital subscription the New York Times currently offers, and Thompson said it will only carry advertising in the form of ‘paid posts’, the native advertising service the title launched in January.
“Now is an express version of Times journalism optimised for smartphones but also giving access to all of the top stories on our website,” he told delegates at the conference.
“The idea around NYT Now is to give people a sense throughout the day of what they need to feel fully briefed on what’s going on in the world. In addition to the [main] smartphone app, it also gives you unlimited access to the top stories on New York Times.com.”
Thompson said the future of digital journalism will “unavoidably” cross platforms and teams across the company have been brought physically closer together in their working environment.
“This is a time of radical change inside the New York Times company,” he went on. “This doesn’t mean diluting the independence of the newsroom when it comes to editorial decision making, but it does mean recognising that the future is intrinsically and unavoidably cross-disciplinary and we will only succeed if newsroom and business sides work very closely together. What’s exciting is just how enthusiastic people are about this new way of working.”
On native advertising, he added: “We and our ad partners are very encouraged by reader engagement into the units. We have very high levels of engagement, in the amount of time being spent on reading articles and being on the site, and we believe that readers who are in a really engaged mood are more likely to sample and get a lot out of native advertising if the content is really good.
“If you want people to read long form content with a marketing message, the content itself has got to be strong.”
Thompson said there was “clear demand” from advertisers for native and its paid posts product launched in January after the company began looking at native advertising in September. Designers worked alongside the newsroom to create the ad units to make it “completely clear” that they represented commercial marketing messages rather than New York Times journalism.
He added that there had been no “significant anxiety” expressed by readers in response to the native ad format, and that the company was strongly pursuing the twin revenue streams of advertising and subscription.
“We’re taking a more aggressive, competitive stance in the market,” he said.