NYT Takes Bold Step to Drive Engagement with Beta620

The New York Times (NYSE:NYT) is seeking to increase user engagement through its recently launched Beta620, a public Beta site to showcase its experimental projects. ^[1] The launch is intended to increase user feedback and community discussions, which can help NYT in designing better and user-friendly online content in the future. NYT competes with publications like the Wall Street Journal owned by embattled News Corp (NASDAQ:NWS) as well as Internet-based outlets like Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and AOL (NYSE:AOL).

We currently have a price estimate of $9 for NYT’s stock, which is roughly 30% above the current market price.

How Beta620 Impacts NYT

In many ways, Beta620 is similar to Google’s experimental project site Google Labs in terms of its layout and purpose. ^[2] Some key products that are being showcased currently on Beta620 are TimesInstant, a tool that enables instant news/content search, and the Community Hub, a dashboard for accessing all user-generated content like commenting stats, ratings and reviews. ^[3]

After converting to a paid subscription model, ^[4] NYT has seen sluggish growth in unique visitors and is hoping that Beta620 will help drive user engagement to increase page views and subscriptions. ^[5]

For now Beta620 allows users only to work with the current NYT content and one of the lingering questions is if and how NYT can use Beta620 to change or create content.

See our full analysis and $9 price estimate for NYT

1. New York Times Launches Beta620, a Site for its Experimental Projects [↩]
2. Google Labs Home Page [↩]
3. NYT Beta620 Home Page [↩]
4. The New York Times Launches Digital Subscriptions [↩]
5. Huffington Post Traffic Surpasses NYTimes.com [↩]