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Facing a post-Trump slowdown, the New York Times eyes the $100 billion games market
The most searched-for terms on the New York Times website last year weren’t “Trump” or “Biden” or even “coronavirus.” They were “crosswords” and “Spelling Bee,” the name of the Times’s online word game.
Now with Trump’s traffic-driving presidency firmly behind us, the publisher is looking to invest more money than ever before in games and puzzles. Games are the Times’s second-most-popular subscription, ahead of cooking, which had 726,000 people enrolled.
Diversification is all very well, but a familiar question rears its head: when is a publisher no longer a publisher, but a games-maker? Or with an eCommerce focus, what stops a publisher being called a retailer? This isn’t an issue in itself, but when a significant proportion of income is from endeavours that aren’t journalism, future business priorities will inevitably change.
How Covid-19 supercharged the Advertising ‘Triopoly’ of Google, Facebook and Amazon
The three tech giants now collect more than half of all ad dollars spent in the U.S. The pandemic economy got them there. A sobering report from the WSJ on why so much money is flowing to Google, Facebook and Amazon despite boycotts last summer.
What news publishers do to retain subscribers
The API surveyed news publishers across the US to identify tactics for retaining subscribers from the playbooks of 526 publications. This report includes a list of the top subscriber retention strategies, as well as a list of effective subscriber-retention ideas to steal.
What publishers can learn from NYT Cooking’s departure from Facebook
Some short but sweet thoughts from MediaPost about the NYT’s abandonment of its 77,000-strong Facebook Group. “Perhaps it isn’t worthwhile for publishers to devote too much time and money to moderating discussions on a platform they can’t monetize.”
