LONDON — The New York Times must halt its digital advertising decline as a priority, says CEO Mark Thompson in this interview with Beet.TV
Advertising, which historically has only ever grown since digital media are themselves growing platforms, fell again by a small amount during the publisher’s last quarter.
“We are absolutely determined to get digital advertising back to growth,” Thompson tells Beet.TV. “We launched our native advertising product back in January – we have a number of contracts already signed – it could build, over time, to be a significant revenue source for us. We will be innovating elsewhere in digital advertising.”
Thompson says “custom solutions” like page takeovers and native advertising are “the highest-value inventory” in the NYT’s ad arsenal, but “routine banner advertising” is increasingly being sold by programmatic algorithms because “data is king”.
Thompson also unveiled an “express”, mobile-only news app, NYT Now, due to launch on April 2 at $8 per month.
We spoke with him at the FT Digital Media Conference. To view all our coverage of the conference, visit this page.
