With the slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Go,” the Grey Lady’s dynamic mobile sites are putting New York Times’ content in millions of pockets.
The New York Times’ mobile site launched in September 2006. The timing was right, says Gregg Fenton, director of emerging platforms in The New York Times Research and Development Operations Group. “I think it was a good time, that the number of people who had data services at the time was increasing, and there was continuous talk within the industry about the need to be expanding outside of the Web and increasing mobile.”
Mobile offers a good connection between print and the Web, says Nick Bilton, a user interface specialist at The New York Times. Efforts such as the Cue Cat were “doomed, because you don’t really ever have your computer with you when you’re reading the [print] newspaper. But you do have your cell phone with you.”
Fenton says the development period before the launch of New York Times Mobile was very short, primarily because the newspaper’s custom content management system already had all the necessary metadata. Hitting the ‘go’ button was as simple as repurposing that metadata.
“In the beginning, [the priorities were] making sure the newspaper sections were represented well on the mobile site,” Fenton says. In the following months, the mobile team added the blogs, weather, stocks, most e-mailed, real estate and showtimes. Keyword tracking and News in Pictures are also available, and the newspaper recently launched mobile video for certain devices. New York Times content is available through off deck, free of charge worldwide, and domestically through MEdia Net from AT&T. Other carrier and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partnerships are pending.
In January 2007, the mobile site had 500,000 page views for the month. By the end of that year, the site had near 10 million. In March 2008, page views had grown to more than 17 million, says Robert Samuels, director of mobile products for NYTimes.com. Fenton described the growth as a hockey stick, where the pace of increase is steady for a short period before it increases significantly. The growth is fed by new functionality and applications such as send to mobile and e-mail this, marketing campaigns, carrier and OEM relationships, industry growth, as well as better data plans & devices, according to Samuels. Some major events, such as the resignation of then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer, drew record traffic to the mobile site.
NYTimes.com uses internal feed development, some outside vendors for mobile technologies and partnerships, and NYTCO shared resources such as the Research and Development team. “We help enable each of the individual business units,” such as the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, Baseline Studios and About.com, says Gregg Fenton, director of emerging platforms in the New York Times Research and Development Operations Group. The group also helps to migrate best practices across The New York Times Co. properties. An example of one of the first mobile migrations has been the porting of NYTimes.com’s award-winning real estate product to other NYTCO regional properties, sharing the infrastructure and best practices for the feature.
Real Estate
The newspaper has had numerous successes with its mobile site, one of The New York Times’ highlights – even in this soft market – is real estate.
The newspaper launched its mobile real estate listings service in September 2007 and traffic and revenue growth has been steady, in spite of the credit crunch and weakening real estate sales.
For real estate agents and readers, the newspapers’ mobile real estate services are a hit. (Media professionals seem to like it, too – the newspaper won a Webby award this year for its mobile real estate listings.)
“The Realtors are big fans of any way they can get their message out to people, and we’re giving them another vehicle to get their properties in front of people. They know, especially around mobile, that it’s a captured audience,” Fenton says.
Click-through rates on text messages are upwards of 40 percent, Fenton says.
The Times’ mobile real estate incorporates the mobile site, text messaging and the print edition of the newspaper:
- Sellers or their agents can purchase a short code, such as 12345 that appears with the property listing in the print edition’s real estate section. Buyers can send a text message with “re 12345” to the New York Times (698698 for NYTNYT) and receive back a text message with a link that leads to the full listing on the mobile Web site.
- Buyers can also go directly to mobile.nytimes.com/realestate on their Web-enabled mobile phone and search for properties by location or property ID number, and then by bedrooms and price, and then select options to see only listings from the past week or show only listings that have scheduled open houses.
- Or, buyers using desktop or laptop computers can send listings to a mobile phone from NYTimes.com.
The full mobile real estate listing frequently includes a detailed ad with several photos, a floor plan and a click-to-call button to call the seller or agent directly. In addition, buyers can send the mobile Web real estate listing to other people’s mobile phones, via a NYTimes.com short code, The newspaper benchmarked other mobile real estate efforts prior to building their own.
Samuels says the New York market is especially suited for mobile real estate. “In particular in this city, the Realtors know the high penetration of BlackBerrys and iPhones and devices that are good for mobile browsing, so it’s a very good for our New York market.”
However, other cities can adopt this model with success. The Boston Globe has a similar mobile real estate program, for example.
When the real estate market nationally does turn around, it’s important for newspapers to have mobile listings in place, Fenton says, “so when the times get begin to get better, we’re already positioned.”
Formatting
The iPhone is usually the second or third highest mobile device on the list of specific models that access the mobile site. It’s a BlackBerry model that ranks first. However, all BlackBerry models combined “dwarf” the number of iPhones accessing the site, Samuels says.
With that in mind, the Times created a “shortcut” for the BlackBerry, a download that puts an icon on a BlackBerry’s home screen that lets users directly access the site instead of opening a browser and going to a menu or typing in the mobile URL. The BlackBerry is the top device accessing the New York Times’ mobile site, and many of those are coming through the BlackBerry shortcut, Samuels says.
In addition, the Times is very careful to ensure the site is optimized correctly for each device, whether its BlackBerry, iPhone or any of the other hundreds of Web-enabled mobile devices. (Fenton noticed that even iPhone users seem to prefer the mobile site over the full Web experience, even though iPhone users can choose either one.)
Behind the optimization is a device database the publishing system that allows the newspaper to tailor what content appears and how it looks on a device-by-device basis, Samuels says. Every time a device accesses the mobile site, the database takes that device’s information and works in conjunction with the publishing system to adjust formatting or render different size images – whatever optimizes the site for that specific device.
“If we didn’t have that, there would be a lot of broken experiences or we would have to dumb the site down to a very low common denominator,” Samuels says.
“This is the same theme we’ve done with a number of things for the New York Times, whether it’s the Web site or the Times Reader – it’s the same theme of making it best for our users on mobile devices,” Fenton says.
More Than Phones
The New York Times was one of the newspapers available for the Amazon Kindle e-reader device when it debuted in late 2007. The New York Times for the Kindle is a static snapshot of the day’s newspaper, but the latest news blog, currently a separate product, does update every few hours for the device. The New York Times has the top monthly subscription newspaper and the top blog for the device, Samuels says.
The newspaper also launched its Times Reader with Microsoft in April 2007. The Reader, which is $14.95 per month (free for home delivery subscribers).The downloadable application syncs latest news and readers can page through the newspaper, similar to a souped-up electronic edition. It’s a much more newspaper-like experience, according to users in focus groups. User can “turn pages” on a table PC, and never see a scroll bar, as the text reflows based on monitor size, screen size, and the user’s chosen font size, Samuels says. The program works computers device running Windows XP or Vista, including tablet PCs. The newspaper just launched a free beta version for Macs.
In addition, the newspaper is each partner on Chumby, a small, wi-fi enabled, touch-screen, clock-radio-like device. The Chumby can play Internet radio stations, read aloud from blogs or Web sites, display live-streaming video of local traffic and much more.
New York Times’ content also appears through several partnerships. Soon the famous crossword puzzle will be available for in a new version for mobile phones and Web-enabled PDAs. Mobile users can synch their PDAs with AvantGo for the latest New York Times news.
Text Messages
The newspaper continues to evolve its text messaging (SMS) programs, which include sending information in response to text-message requests from readers and sending out major breaking news alerts.
Incoming Requests
In late 2006, the newspaper put a small house ad in the upper-left corner of the weather page inviting readers to text a request to the newspaper to get the latest weather. “We just put this tiny little refer in the top left corner of the weather page and started getting a decent amount of traffic,” says Bilton, who coordinated the effort.
Creating that promotion was a big step for the newspaper in promoting its mobile offerings and training readers to associate the newspaper with their mobile device – and doing so in a very small space. “I think it’s important,” Bilton says. “There’s a delicate balance between adding content and explaining it, but not writing a book. … It’s a completely new behavior, and you have to make it make sense, so readers know what they’re doing.”
Now, promotions for various SMS-based offerings appear on the front of the print newspaper and rotate through section fronts. In addition, promotions appear on the inside of many sections, such as at the end of columns.
Text-message users can also request the latest headlines from any section of the newspaper, request any columnist’s most recent piece and request latest news headlines by sending a text message. Mobile users can send text messages to CalorieCount.com and get nutritional information on just about any food. The newspaper owns CalorieCount.com through its About.com property.
Bilton says some of the most popular content for SMS programs is weather or sports scores.
The newspaper is working to add a text-message, request-based election results program for the national elections in November. Times readers may be able to send a text message request to the newspaper and receive the latest election results from national or state elections. The newspaper is also looking into allowing readers to request restaurant reviews from the newspaper. There may be opportunities for readers to vote on something or rate something through text messaging in the future as well.
Although the New York Times’ text messaging system works through the newspaper’s infrastructure, Bilton says there are many inexpensive services that newspapers can use to set up keywords and more for their own programs. Those include msgme and 4INFO.
Outgoing Alerts
The New York Times program also includes text-base alerts. For example, readers can subscribe to breaking news text message alerts from their mobile phones by texting NEWSALERTS to 698698, for example.
“We’re very conscious about how many messages we send out, because we know people are going to be charged for it, or it’s going to come off of their plan,” Fenton says. Knowing that, the newspaper sends fewer breaking news alerts to mobile subscribers than to e-mail subscribers, and newspaper editors focus the breaking news alerts that may affect people who are not at their desks.
The breaking news alerts that are sent out via text message have a link in them that brings subscribers to the mobile site for more information. Text-message alerts sometimes include ads. “With text messaging, it’s a very high viewing rate,” Fenton says. “You know when somebody gets a text message, they’re going to look at it.”
The newspaper manages its own subscribe/unsubscribe system. Mobile subscribers who no longer wish to receive message from the newspaper can simply send a text message to the newspaper, and that person is unsubscribed instantly and automatically.
Sales and Promotions
Overall, the newspaper company has a unified sales force that sells across platforms. All sales representatives can sell mobile as a part of a larger package – by far the most common mobile sell – or sell it alone. Sales have increased as the mobile product evolves and as advertisers and agencies learn more about the medium and how best to use it, Samuels says.
The mobile site has a horizontal banner-ad along the top, and banner ads appear on the home page, all section-level, and article-level pages on the mobile site. Other revenue comes from the real estate product and ads in text messages.
Training ad reps to sell mobile has been part of an ongoing education and training process that Samuels has helped lead. The newspaper has an internal mobile evangelist among the sales staff, as well.
The company does not break out mobile revenue from other revenue, so Samuels could not provide specific mobile revenue figures.
In addition to increasing revenue, growing traffic is a key part of the newspaper’s mobile strategy going forward. The newspaper company is using all of its assets, such as regular print refers, advertising on newspaper stands and including mobile in larger branding messages. Ads for the mobile site have also appeared on the blue polybags that protect the newspaper from the rain and on posters in AT&T stores. When Apple’s Steve Jobs first demonstrated the iPhone in 2007 at an Apple conference, he used it to go to the New York Times’ Web site.
Most importantly, the newspaper is placing ads strategically throughout where commuters may have a few minutes with nothing else to do than browse the mobile Web. “You capture them at those times,” Fenton says. “Here in the New York area, it’s on the buses and trains, so we advertise there.”
Bilton says the newspaper is also investigating using two-dimensional (2-D) barcodes in its ads. With 2-D barcodes, readers can take a photo of a barcode with their mobile phone and the phone will take the reader directly to a mobile Web site with more information.
The lack of standards in this area – not all phones can read all types of 2-D barcodes – is a problem. However, Bilton says, Google’s Android mobile phone platform will reportedly be able to read all types of 2-D barcodes. “I think that will be a big game changer, and once that happens, maybe we’ll be able to start putting that in the paper.”
Looking Ahead: Mobile Video and Community Involvement
The newspaper is also offering mobile video, but only for select devices the newspaper knows can handle video – BlackBerrys, iPhones and certain Nokias, for now. The device database prevents the mobile video link from appearing on devices that cannot support it, notes Samuels.
The videos are always short. People downloading video to devices with slower connections may need some patience, but devices operating on a Wi-Fi network handle video quickly. NYTimes.com mobile video is in a beta testing period now, but Samuels says it is doing well so far.
Also on the list of possible future enhancements: Restaurant reviews and ways to let the community alert the newspaper via mobile when a major event occurs.
“The mobile Web is a really important part of people’s lives—and it’s going to grow – with all the new phones coming out – as more and more devices become Web enabled,” Bilton says. “If you don’t offer it, somebody else will, and then your reader will go somewhere else for it.”
Beth Lawton is manager, digital media communications for the Newspaper Association of America. More…