| How to increase traffic on nytimes.com: Reasoning - Businessinsider.com, buzzfeed.com & huffingtonpost.com are loaded with aggregated content. Not all of it is great, often it is old news or a meme from 3 months ago. But, every piece of content is carefully designed and crafted to produce as many clicks as possible. It's laughable at times how headlines are rewritten and sexed up to get you to click. As soon as you realized that it's the same article you read 2 weeks ago on nytimes.com but with better images, a nice interactive chart and a youtube video you might feel bad for a second or two but the damage is done - product sold. === 7 NYTIMES Homepage Ideas === 1) DESIGN: Simpler - less noise - scannable (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/) Too much noise on the homepage - yes we know you produce 25,000 articles everyday but we can't read all of it in 2 minutes - Make it easier to scan - my eyes should
not be going left - right and up - down constantly. 2) HEADLINES - Please make them more interesting - more to the point - shorter - Tell us what the article is really about - A/B test them live. 3) VIDEOS More videos - not one-offs but branded segments with style and character and good production value - with an actual point of view or focus not some bland summary like "Ok this is what happened today in Washington ..." - we can get that anywhere. The folks at theverge.com do a good job of that - please copy, adapt & iterate. 4) SECTIONS: Books,Music,TV,Restaurants You can read a great book review on nytimes.com but you can't download a sample or add it to "Book to read later" list, or take any meaningful action on that book - fix it. Same deal for movies, restaurants or TV shows. I'd suggest some integration with Netflix/Amazon/iTunes/Google/Spotify. 5) TRAVEL - Again, great read but all you can do is save a link to that article for your next vacation -- not good enough. Suggestion - mobile service/app/map integration that keeps track of those favorite reviews and notifies you, the next time you walk into that restaurant so you'll know
what not order. 6) What do I want to read next ? Articles read + (Netflix info + Amazon info + Spotify info + Other services/purchases) = ??? If you can data-mined at least some of that you could have a good enough answer most of the time. 7) KILL THE PAYWALL For the overwhelming majority of users this is a big NO. As an added bonus to a Netflix or Amazon Prime subscription ... maybe. BONUS: Better search & filtering - |