Web 3.0 & NYT (Part 2)

Vertical Strategy

The New York Times Company is operating in a number of key verticals (Jobs, Business & Finance, Health, Shopping, Real Estate, Autos, Technology / Gadgets, Travel, Entertainment, and Lifestyle) through its sites NYTimes.com, Boston.com, About.com, etc. We will take a look at the Company’s various online verticals in this segment.

Vertical Search
Consumersearch.com provides consumers with ranking, reviews and descriptions of various products and services, complete with links, analysis of who the experts are and what they say, listing of the top-rated products, according to the experts, and prices and links to retailers that offer the recommended products. It also acts as a search engine to find product reviews and information. In May 2007, ConsumerSearch.com was acquired by About.com, and as a result, is now a part of NYT.

Health
NYT has had exposure in the health space through About.com but recently About.com also acquired
UCompareHealthCare.com as online health has been growing rapidly. UCompareHealthCare.com helps consumers find and compare quality and profiles of doctors, hospitals, and nursing homes throughout the U.S. The site also provides dynamic Web-based interactive tools to consumers to enable them to measure the quality of healthcare services available. NYTimes.com has also launched NYTimes.com/Health, which will cover Medicine and Fitness, as well as consumer health issues. It will also include a blog by Times Health Columnist, Tara Parker-Pope.

Calorie-Count.com allows users to search for information for specific foods, browse food groups, and print nutrition labels. It also provides weight loss tools, nutritional information, and a vibrant and supportive community to help one lose or maintain weight, safely and effectively.

Both UCompareHealthCare.com and Calorie-Count.com are part of About.com. In June, About’s health channel, which is the number 2 commercial health site behind WebMD, experienced traffic growth of 60% and page views climbed 144%.

Jobs
NYT has entered the online jobs space through a partnership with Monster. The Company provides job search services on Boston.com through https://www.boston.com/jobs/ and on NYTimes.com through https://jobmarket.nytimes.com/pages/jobs/.

The Company also has a separate section for jobs on About.com and it provides quality content on career related issues and has a job search engine powered by Indeed.com. NYT holds a 14% stake in Indeed.com.

NYTimes.com recently introduced Shifting Careers, a new blog dedicated to the ways in which people are reinventing their careers as entrepreneurs and independent business owners.

Shopping
The Company is present in the online shopping space through NYStore.com, About.com and Consumersearch.com. The New York Times Store offers hundreds of products – from books to classic photographs, reprints of vintage news to posters. About.com has a shopping search engine powered by PriceGrabber.com.

Travel
About.com covers the travel segment in detail and has entered into a partnership with Kayak for search facilities. The Company also has a travel section in its various newspaper sites. The NYT has a blog on travel, which has an interesting Q&A section. The T Magazine plans to launch a separate site targeted at the travel market later this year.

Entertainment
About.com has an Entertainment section that covers Music, Movies, Comedy, TV, Radio and the Celebrity world in detail. The Newspaper sites also cover entertainment. NYTimes.com has introduced TV Decoder, a new blog covering the television industry. TV Decoder is a guide to what’s on, who’s watching and why it matters — it covers the day’s on-screen and behind-the-scenes developments.

Real Estate
The New York Times Company site has a separate section dedicated to real estate and consumers can search for property for rent or sale by zip code, city, etc. The site has interesting articles and covers the real estate space reasonably well. Other sites in the NYT portfolio like, Boston.com also cover real estate. The New York Times recently introduced a property listings product for Mobile. Users can now receive and send property listings on their mobile devices, regardless of whether their property search began in print, online, or on The Times mobile real estate site.

Other Classifieds
The Company, through its various newspaper sites, is present in the classified categories like auto, real estate, personals, jobs, etc. We have discussed jobs and real estate separately. Personals and Auto, so far, have no additional initiative beyond the regular newspaper classifieds.

Mobile News / Search
The New York Times has introduced a mobile news services. It provides mobile users with the latest news on their mobiles phone by SMS alert. The mobile users just need to enter their mobile number on the Company’s site at https://www.nytimes.com/gst/send_sms.html.

The various newspaper sites (Boston.com, NYTimes.com, etc.) and About.com also covers Business and Finance, gadgets and technology, food and drink, lifestyle and fashion, parenting and sports. The Company plans to launch the online version of its Style Magazine, T Magazine online on December 02, 2007.

Gaps in The New York Times portfolio
The New York Times is present in almost all the important verticals through its newspaper sites and About.com. Other than Healthcare, where it is #2, and owns most of the key properties in play, the rest of its vertical strategy is based on partnerships and revenue sharing. In Jobs, it has partnered with Monster and taken a stake in Indeed. In Travel, it has partnered with Kayak.
It needs to beef up verticals like Business & Finance, Personals, Real Estate, and Movies.

(To Be Continued)

[Part 1]

This segment is part 2 in the series : Web 3.0 & NYT
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