NYT tries to be all things
Christine Herron, a venture capitalist with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s fund, has an interesting post about the New York Times, and Martin Nisenholtz’s challenge as vice-president of digital operations for the Grey Lady. As she puts it: “How does a established news institution transform itself into a sleek Web 2.0 business?”
The answer, according to Nisenholtz, is to focus on circulation rather than traffic. In other words, try to convert the 2.5 million visitors that the newspaper’s site gets on an average day into long-term readers — and possibly even into subscribers to TimesSelect, the for-pay service that about 500,000 people have signed up for. So his goals are to a) “Keep users coming back, and staying longer,” and b) “Increase not only the average number of visits per reader, but also the average number of page views per visit.” But how to do that?
As usual, some of the most interesting stuff shows up in the comments: in a response to a commenter who works at CNN, where they get lots of hits but not a lot of longer visits, Christine says that one formula that seems to work is “snippets/facts drive traffic [while] essays/analysis build readership. So in theory, you need both if you’re building an actual community or reader base.” Good advice.
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(On Jan 23rd, 2007 at 11:15 am)
Do you think this will make my Web 2.0 stocks rise?
http://iam.always.online.fr/tr.php?wordid=2296
(On Jan 23rd, 2007 at 11:55 am)
Anything’s possible, Roberto