times - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Times are tough for newspaper executives.

The newspaper industry's woes were highlighted once again last week when The New York Times Company posted a quarterly loss from continuing operations and announced that it would have to write down the value of some of its assets by over $100m.

The New York Times' decision to drop its outdated subscription model appears to have paid off, with visitor numbers increasing by almost 3m in October.

Figures from Nielsen/NetRatings, quoted in WebProNews, show that the newspaper's online audience grew from 14.6m in September to 17.5m last month.

The New York Times has been making changes to its UGC policy recently -enabling users to make comments directly on its blog pages but stopping short of allowing them on all articles.

Until the end of last year, it had no system for user participation, but has since started to add links to news sharing sites Newsvine and Digg so that comments could at least be left on these sites.

The Guardian remains the most popular UK newspaper website, according to the latest stats from Nielsen//NetRatings. The newspaper has now held the top spot for the last 12 months.

The Telegraph has taken over second spot from The Sun, while The Times, and the Daily Mirror are fourth and fifth respectively. In addition, all of the top ten newspapers in the list have managed to increase their online audiences so far this year.

UK online retailers have widely differing levels of speed and accuracy when dealing with customer enquiries, according to a new study.

A test of leading etailers by Talisma found 45% failed to reply to customer emails, while only 47% of those that did provided "accurate and complete information" in their responses.

The Guardian has today unveiled a new look for its homepage, with a more image-heavy approach than the previous version...

The new look Times Online site launched yesterday, ditching the old black and white design, in favour of colour-coding, though the site has been experiencing teething problems so far.

The Times' website, which was redesigned in-house by Tomaso Capuano and Jon Warden, now features lime green in the masthead, and green, blue and grey throughout the rest of the site. The information architecture was designed by Melissa Fleck.

Obvious font issues aside, we think it looks pretty good...

Poor old Rhys Blakely. He's written another fine internet-focused article for The Times only to have it savaged by the whims of the commercial department...

The above trade-off between destroying the user (brand) experience in favour of a bit of short-term capitalism is, frankly, in 2007, a bit lame. One day Mr Murdoch will crack down on this sort of thing.

Surely publishers should be selling targeted access to users, rather than selling out anybody who happens to visit?

Are you responsible for the creative execution of this ad campaign? Get in touch if you'd like to debate the merits of rubbish ads like this:  blog@e-consultancy.com .

UK newspapers are becoming increasingly aggressive in their Google strategies, with more and more buying search terms to direct readers looking for news stories to their websites.

Back in October, we covered an article by Heather Hopkins at Hitwise UK, which looked into The Sun’s search marketing strategy. The article showed how the tabloid was pursuing a more aggressive paid search strategy, with some success.

The New York Times announced on Monday that it will allow its stories to be commented upon, yet it stops short of embracing user-generated content by allowing comments only through third party sites (Digg, Facebook and Newsvine).

It is the first time the newspaper's online site has added a news-sharing tool, which will allow users to discuss its stories on social news sites, though in truth users can do this anyway...

Nevertheless, the paper has embedded links to all three sites onto many of its online stories.