In its efforts to capture an ever-distracted mainstream audience, The New York Times launches Watching, a film tv content hub, featuring the latest collections from leading content streaming providers, and includes a bi-weekly newsletter subscription.
Watching allows users to choose recommendations of existing and new tv shows, based on genre and mood, through a prominent personalized display section, fitting a user’s preferences.
Other features, worth noting from NYT includes:
- Providing information on where to stream the title and the ability to start watching with one click
- Guidance on why you should watch it (or why it may not be for you)
- Links to some of the best essays, interviews, recaps, and reviews about the title from across the web
- Saving all preferences in a watchlist
Publishers spending on branded personalized content is on the rise, according to Polar’s most recent whitepaper on the ‘Business of Branded Content‘, with 40 percent of publishers citing less than 50 percent renewal rates. Many brands are experimenting with branded content initiatives leading to weak renewals.
This isn’t The New York Time’s first venture in the personalised content realm, already having the likes of their recommendations engine (sidebar and news page feature), however, what this is signalling is that they are no longer playing catch up in their audience development strategy, as content streaming is currently mainstream in today’s online culture. Leveraging their existing platform to facilitate this will be interesting to follow as they continue to build this vertical.
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All New York Times subscribers, as well as anyone who is a registered user (even with a free account), can head over to Watching and check it out.
