How The New York Times delivers better ad experiences
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February 2024Share this page
How The New York Times delivers better ad experiences
February 2024Hear from leaders across disciplines at The New York Times, including Joy Robins, global chief advertising officer, about how advertising and subscription-based models help them serve readers by upholding its mission as a trusted news and information source.
Learn how the team laid a foundation for its first-party data platform by training machine learning models with voluntary, opt-in surveys and readership signals. See how its ad partnerships enable results, helping the company serve the right ads to the right audience.
Find more thought leadership on data solutions and marketing strategy insights at the Think with Google YouTube Channel.
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Joy Robins: Our mission at The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. We deliver best-in-class journalism. And, in recent years, we’ve expanded with The Athletic, Wirecutter, Cooking, and Games.
Delivering this product takes a whole ecosystem of dedicated employees, working in the newsroom and in the field, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
And, to do this at a price that people can afford, we rely on a mixed model of subscription and ad revenue. Advertising is key to how we deliver a renowned, iconic publication.
Jay Glogovsky: The New York Times has over 10 million subscribers. Relevance is key to crafting a premium ad experience that resonates with our readers and provides an opportunity for our advertisers to make a mark on the world.
When we can serve an ad at the right time aligned with our readers interests, it performs better for our partners, and creates a better ad experience for our readers. It’s ultimately a win-win for both.
Robins: Our ad partnerships are critical. The ongoing partnership with Google enables us to activate our first-party data, to craft an experience that brings value to our readers and our partners.
Mohit Lohia: Our readers trust us with their data, and it is our primary responsibility to protect their data and respect their choices. The Times builds its first-party data product through voluntary, opt-in surveys and readership signals.
Opt-in data that we collect from surveys allows us to build deep understanding of our readership and create more personalized experiences for our readers.
A few years ago, our data science team came to us with an idea. If we were able to understand what an article made a user feel, it could become like a powerful signal that could be very meaningful for an advertiser.
Glogovsky: Through crowdsourcing, we were able to obtain 150,000 emotional responses from our readers to help us understand how readers feel when they’re reading articles.
We were able to glean 42 unique emotions that we can use to align with our advertisers content and messages to feel super relevant and empathetic.
Robins: Our first-party data strategy allows us to engage readers based on their interests, leading to better attention and higher quality impressions.
Glogovsky: Over and over, we’re outperforming industry benchmarks oftentimes by 2X.
Lohia: But success is not just about numbers. Advertising allows us to unlock new opportunities. It gives us the space to dedicate resources to stories and topics which most other organizations can’t cover. Just one example, women’s sports coverage.
Robins: It’s our readers that are at the heart of everything we do. And it’s our relationship with them that yields real value for advertisers. And, in turn, their partnership fuels more quality content and ensures we can keep showing up as a source of truth for our readers.
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