Tuesday 23rd March: The NYT focuses investment on gaming

March 23, 2021

Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Esther.

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.

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.

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.

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."

This week's podcast:

This week Hannah Robathan, co-founder of Shado, tell us about the realities of publishing a print magazine and online platform that gives people the space to tell their own stories. We spoke about their frustration with the mainstream media, what activism means and what success looks like for Shado.

Once we've hit our goal, we're going to dedicate the money to some new equipment and soundproofing against babies, cats and puppies. We're 94% of the way there...can you help us take our audio to the next level by chipping in for a virtual coffee?