Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Wired’s un-paywalling of stories built on public data is a reminder of its role in the information ecosystem
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Sept. 29, 2014, 2:26 p.m.
Business Models

Capital New York give us a look at The New York Times’ native advertising business in a profile of Meredith Kopit Levien, its executive vice president for advertising, and it appears to be growing. Since launching earlier this year, it’s struck deals with 32 different brands — from Netflix to Thomson Reuters — to create ads that cost from $25,000 to more than $200,000 just to create.

And the Times’ in-house content studio, T Brand Studio, is up to a staff of 16 — up from nine when my colleague Justin Ellis wrote about the Times’ approach native advertising in June.

The build up of the Times’ native advertising capacity is part of a larger overhaul of its advertising department that began when Levien took over as the executive vice president for advertising in July 2013. She’s replaced about one-third of the current staff with new hires, bringing on more than 80 staffers. Of those who left, about half were offered buyouts or early retirement, “a move that some interpreted as a way of nudging older employees out the door,” Capital writes.

Print continues to generate most of the Times’ advertising revenue, but with its continued emphasis on native and digital advertising, especially video, Levian said she’s optimistic: “We’re certainly not going to put up a victory banner yet, but we are beginning to find our way into what feels like a sustainable path toward growing the digital business.”

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Wired’s un-paywalling of stories built on public data is a reminder of its role in the information ecosystem
Trump’s wholesale destruction of the information-generating sectors of the federal government will have implications that go far beyond .gov domains.
New York Times bundles give European publishers a subscription boost
“There’s no reason to think this shouldn’t work in most markets where subscription-based payment is already well advanced.”
A pipeline company is suing Greenpeace for $300 million. A pay-to-play newspaper is accused of tainting the jury pool
Though Central ND News promises to “fill the void in community news after years of decline in local reporting by legacy media” with “100% original reporting,” no staff are listed on the site and few stories have bylines.