Times Select and Anti-Viral Marketing

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Times Select and Anti-Viral Marketing

How do you elminate viral marketing? Put a wall around your content. Times Select shows how its done.

I get a monthly email from the New York Times with the ten most emailed articles. It's a very interesting list and is telling in many ways about what news is most important to readers.

It used to be at least half columns penned by their top columnists like Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman, etc. Here is a list of all of their op-ed columnists.

Well guess what? Not one of them is on the top ten list anymore. Of course. Because they are barely read online anymore because of the crazy Times Select idea.

Here is the list of the top ten list for February:

	Wednesday, March 1, 2006



Here are the 10 Most Read Articles on NYTimes.com from February. 1. White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm By ERIC LIPTON, Published: February 10, 2006 The Bush administration was alerted to broken levees and flooding in New Orleans hours after their collapse, documents show. 2. Fellow Hunter Shot by Cheney Suffers Setback By ELISABETH BUMILLER and ANNE E. KORNBLUT, Published: February 15, 2006 The downturn in the 78-year-old's health significantly changed the tone of the White House reaction to the hunting accident. 3. Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds By GINA KOLATA, Published: February 8, 2006 A large study has found that a low-fat diet has no effect in reducing the risk of getting cancer or heart disease. 4. U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review By SCOTT SHANE, Published: February 21, 2006 At the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents. 5. To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me By JONATHAN D. GLATER, Published: February 21, 2006 E-mail has made college professors more approachable, but many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that had kept students at a healthy distance. 6. The Freshman By CHIP BROWN, Published: February 26, 2006 Rahmatullah Hashemi was the Taliban's chief spokesman abroad. So how did he end up at Yale? 7. After Neoconservatism By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, Published: February 19, 2006 A former neoconservative theorist argues that with the Iraq conflict, the ideology that won the cold war has come to threaten peace. Can a movement turn away from militarism and toward a more durable use of power? 8. Cyberthieves Silently Copy Your Passwords as You Type By TOM ZELLER Jr., Published: February 27, 2006 Software that copies users' keystrokes and sends the information to crooks may be the next big trend in cybercrime. 9. No End to Questions in Cheney Hunting Accident By ANNE E. KORNBLUT and RALPH BLUMENTHAL, Published: February 14, 2006 The White House sought to explain why it took most of a day to disclose that the vice president accidentally shot a fellow hunter. 10. Some Democrats Are Sensing Missed Opportunities ADAM NAGOURNEY and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, Published: February 8, 2006 Heading into this year's elections, senior Democrats said that they sense they had failed to exploit Republican vulnerabilities.

Read it and weep Thomas, Maureen, Frank, and the rest of the gang. Because your opinions aren't flying around the web anymore.

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Posted March 2, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

"I get a monthly email from the New York Times with the ten most emailed articles. It's a very interesting list and is telling in many ways about what news is most important to readers."

The New York Times having interesting reporting?

Sorry, in this day and age, I just don't see it. To put it somewhat blithely, I see the Times having as much relevance in our digital world as the Catholic Chirch has relevance in sexual mores: it may be an authority to a select few, but it hardly captures the zeitgeist.

This, of course, may be a function of their (mis)management. Or it may just be a function of the fact that the internet does a better job of disseminating the news than a newspaper (or TV studio) ever could.

Posted by: Dave | Mar 2, 2006 8:48:41 AM

Couldn't agree with you more. Times Select is a dumb idea and I haven't read a single op-ed piece since they implemented it.

Posted by: Vineet Buch | Mar 2, 2006 3:22:03 PM

What's ironic is I just copied a link from this list on your blog and emailed it to a friend. They really don't get it.

Posted by: charlie crystle | Mar 3, 2006 6:44:59 AM

stipulated that, by definition, times select content cannot possible be in the top emailed list.

but isn't the real data point/issue, has the top emailed list itself become less popular? are less nytimes pieces being email by people to others due to times select? if so, ok, fred's point is made. but if not, then the overall point -- times select is bad for viral marketing of nytimes -- is invalid. and the only valid (and painfully obvious) point would be, times select-ed content is unavailable for free email/viral distribution...

Posted by: steve | Mar 3, 2006 2:16:04 PM

"Because they are barely read online anymore because of the crazy Times Select idea."

Any data or criteria to back that rhetoric up? Last I heard they had 410K subscribers, 38% paying for online only. Is that subscription rate rising or falling? How is it affecting the overall reach of NYTimes.com?

As much as I take Alexa ranks with a grain of salt,
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&compare_sites=&y=p&q=&url=nytimes.com

Doesn't appear people are abandoning the site due to walled content...

For me, this is an interesting experiment. You're correct, these columnists are nowhere close to as much a part of the online conversation anymore, although still read widely in print. But I can't recall 'Conversation' being on the balance sheet, so I'm curious to know what the success/failure metric is.

Posted by: Sebastian | Mar 4, 2006 2:38:25 PM

A VC

Musings of a VC in NYC