Times Extra’s Outside-In Approach Aims for Greater Engagement
Important Details: The first thing you notice is the green type. Once a NYT.com reader turns on a Times Extra toggle — a 15-second proposition — the news stories on the Times’ home page sprout little boxes under the main stories. Within the box, five or more related stories, each topped by a green headline. Under a New York Times-written story on the conflict in Gaza, for instance, you’ll find Gaza-related news and opinion from Marketwatch, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times — traditional, if competitive sources — and non-traditional sources as well. Those included, on a recent day, Israel’s Ha’aretz and blogs including Power and Control, JihadBlog, the Mahablog and AfterDowningStreet.
The idea is to give Times readers pointers to the best non-Times coverage on key stories, so that they will increase their engagement — time on site, number of visits, etc. — with NYT.com. It’s also an acknowledgment, as Marc Frons, CTO of digital operations for the Times company, told Outsell, that the “Times is part of the link economy.”
So far, after a month of service, the Times says that “less than a tenth” of its site visitors — 20 million per month, as the top news-company-owned site in the US — have tried Times Extra. While the Times is not releasing metrics, Frons says it is a net-plus. As the Times measures the impact of usage, it’s getting more engagement from Times Extra users overall, even as some Times Extra users click away from the Times site (clicking on a link replaces the Times page with the new site).
Based on initial learnings, the site is planning to expand the feature to its story pages, though has not yet decided on a timeline.
Times Extra is powered by Blogrunner, a news/blog aggregator company that the Times purchased in 2006. Currently, the Times trolls just 200 of the 10,000 Blogrunner-indexed sites. Those 200 were initially selected and will be added to over time; a Blogrunner algorithm determines contextual fit.
Implications: Outsell believes Times Extra is an important innovation. It’s a gutsy move, putting non-monetized content right in front of the noses of readers. In so doing, the Times acknowledges that as good and broad as its content is, it’s only one news provider in a big world. It is no longer trying to contain its readers, rather helping them in a Times-plus scenario. That’s smart, and is more likely to push the Times ahead in its engagement numbers, which are key to revenue growth. Recall that the Times — the leader in time on site per month — registers only 40 or less minutes per month on average. That’s a far cry from the engagement the Times sees from its print readers, who spends hours with the paper each week. The disparity in engagement is a big reason for the disparity in revenue – the Times gets about 13% of its total revenues from online at this point. Importantly, the Times is at the top of these stats; they are universally true of newspapers and their sites.
Additionally, Outsell believes there are good learnings here for B2B, trade and other publishers, especially those which enjoy the advantages of being leaders in their sectors.
Other sites are employing “outside-in” functionality; WashingtonPost.com was an early pioneer, employing contextual boxes, powered by both Inform and Aggregate Knowledge (see Insights 16 May 2008, Aggregate Knowledge Points Toward the “Discovery” Web) . These boxes, while offering good content, have been ghettoized at the bottom of story pages, and have had relatively little impact. Now Times Extra shows a new way for a news site to once again become a news portal for its readers.