New York Times spikes youth-targeted app NYT Now as it looks to third parties to expand demographic
The New York Times has announced it will pull its app NYT Now from app stores at the end of the month, admitting it did not take off with its target youth audience as the publisher hoped.
New York Times digital
Instead, the Times will focus its efforts on third-party platforms like Facebook and Twitter to expand its reach among younger readers.
The app first launched in early 2014, at roughly half the price of the cheapest digital subscription of the Times, with the intention of expanding the paper’s audience to reach a younger demographic.
NYT Now provides a curated list of stories from the Times portfolio, a bitesize offering to appeal to the dwindling attention span of its target audience, and attract a broader audience that might not be full package subscribers.
Other publishers followed suit, launching subset apps to open up new revenue streams as the print market continues to dwindle, and meet readers where they are most engaged, on mobile.
Yet where others have succeeded in this space, today (18 August) the publisher has admitted “the app never quite took off as The Times had hoped”, despite transitioning from subscription to free last year.
The Times will instead focus its efforts on third-party platforms like Facebook and Twitter to expand its reach among younger readers, it said, where the youth audience is in abundance. Facebook dominates the social media space in terms of reach with the millennial demographic and engagement, with recent comScore research showing the platform reaches over 95 per cent of online 18-34 year olds in the US.
Talking on how the company is shifting its focus to meet audiences in spaces they already inhabit, Kinsey Wilson, the executive vice president for product and technology, said: “That gave us a different ability to tap into younger audiences and to provide exposure to a much, much wider audience,” Wilson said.
As part of the changes, the publisher has incorporated some of the features of NYT Now — including morning and evening news briefings, bullet-point lists and a more conversational tone — into The Times’s main news products, including the core mobile app.
NYT Now will no longer be available to download starting the week of 29 August. It follows the same fate as NYT Opinion, an app that was shut down in 2014 for failing to gain traction with audiences.