The New York Times will stop charging for its mobile app NYT Now next month, an acknowledgment that its strategy of attracting more young digital readers with a fee-based subscription hasn't been working.
The app, which debuted a year ago at $7.99 a month, will be free as of May 11th and have fewer stories and new features such as showing more recent articles higher on the screen.
A slimmed-down version of the full $15-a-month digital subscription, NYT Now was aimed at younger readers with stories selected and summarised by Times editors. Apple chose it as one of its best apps of 2014.
It failed to generate a large paying audience partly because of “how we positioned the pricing of it,” Mr Kinsey Wilson, executive vice president for product and technology at the media company, said.
The goal in making the app free is to boost readership and experiment with "the best way to migrate those readers into some kind of pay model over time," he said. The decision, which had been hinted at for months, marks another setback in the New York Times mobile strategy.
Last autumn, the newspaper shut down its opinion app four months after it was introduced because it failed to attract a large audience. The Times has been building the readership of its free cooking app, which debuted last September. Dropping the NYT Now app's fee won't have a big impact on the company's financial performance, said Alan Mutter, a newspaper consultant.
“Still, the decision highlights the tensions facing many publishers trying to balance subscriptions and advertising in the digital age,” he said. “If you want to sell advertising you need lots of eyeballs,” Mr Mutter said. “If you charge subscriptions you reduce the number of eyeballs you’re going to attract.”
The free app could become a vehicle for the Times to sell more advertising or promote stories to entice readers to buy the newspaper or digital subscriptions, Mr Mutter said.
The Times plans to reintroduce its main app by April 24 with a team of editors selecting stories instead of automatically downloading them from the website and publishing a a wider variety of articles .
At the same time, the Times also will introduce a new app for the Apple Watch with one-sentence stories designed for smaller screens. Asked if the Times plans more apps, Mr Wilson said the paper is looking at “additional new ventures” likely to “launch over the course of the next year.”
– Bloomberg
