Change is good as New York Times tweaks popular site

By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor


The New York Times has spent the past few months polishing its Web site as it attempts to give its readers more choices.

The most notable tweak was the September shuttering of TimesSelect. The Times also began offering access to all of its online content, as well as archives dating back to 1987, free of charge.

Although TimesSelect drew more than 780,000 users, the paper decided to replace the subscription model by one based on advertising, said Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager for NYTimes.com.

American Express signed on as the first sponsor of the opened areas of NYTimes.com. For the past few weeks, it had a significant advertising presence on NYTimes.com’s home page as well as in the opinion and archives sections that were formerly behind the pay wall.

TimesSelect rolled out in September 2005 and at its end had approximately 787,400 active subscribers. Of the subscribed users, 471,200 received TimesSelect free as part of their home-delivery subscriptions, 227,000 paid for online access and another 89,200 received it for free on college campuses through TimesSelect University.

The Times is also offering archived content between 1851 and 1922 free of charge. It charges nonsubscribers a fee to access stories published between 1923 and 1986.

Home-delivery subscribers can access The Times’ complete archive, free of charge.

NYTimes.com drew more than 14 million unique users in July, tops among all newspaper Web sites according to Nielsen//Net Ratings.

Customization

NYTimes.com also formally launched My Times, http://my.nytimes.com, a feature that allows readers to personalize Web pages by organizing sources from all over the Web.

“Our goal with My Times was to create a unique Web portal that gives readers the ability to organize New York Times content, as well as content from around the Web, on their very own page,” said Rob Larson, NYTimes.com’s vice president of product management and development.

“This personalized service makes it easy for users to read all that they like, from one central place.”

My Times users seeking additional information about their prescribed topics can also get personalized recommendations from Times journalists.

My Times receives about 94,000 unique users a month and out of those, around 45,000 users have customized their My Times page, Larson said.

“We have also added thousands of news sources and new widgets such as The New York Times crosswords, local movie show times, flickr slideshows and weather,” said Larson. “In the coming months, we will also be integrating ‘Add to My Times’ buttons around the site, making it easy for readers to set up pages and we expect usage to increase significantly once those buttons are introduced.”

Designed in-house

“My Times went from being an advanced prototype to a production-ready system,” Larson said. “We also integrated the in-house NYTimes.com advertising system into My Times, so that our advertising clients would be able to buy ads and widget sponsorships in the same way they do for the rest of the site.”

NYTimes.com also upgraded software used to create and distribute widgets.