After a loss in the third quarter, New York Times CEO Mark Thompson admitted on Thursday that the company “still has a lot of work to do” but said he was confident that its plans to regain revenue through new products and services would be successful.
Here are seven of the company’s revenue-generating initiatives discussed in the Thursday earnings call:
Corporate sales
The news organization will offer companies the chance to purchase access to NYT content using their IP addresses at a discounted rate, as it does with learning institutions. The hope is that employees who access the newspaper at work will get hooked and subscribe at home.
Also read: Lower Advertising Revenue Pushes New York Times Company to Loss
Conferences
NYT has 19 conferences planned for 2014. “The plan is to continue to build it out both domestically and internationally,” Thompson said. “They’re a great way of marketing the Times” and “its best known journalists and opinion writers.”
New Products
Thompson and Denise Warren, who leads NYT’s digital products group, said there would be several new products coming next year and beyond, though they declined to go into specifics other than to say they will be “unique.”
Also read: Rick Berke Leaving New York Times to Run Politico
Video and Mobile
Thompson admitted that there’s still a long way to go to maximize the NYT’s revenue from its mobile and video units. Mobile ads accounted for less than 10 percent of the company’s $33 million digital ad revenue, though the percentage of people who access the Internet through mobile devices has increased sharply over the past several years.
International Brand Unification
With the conversion of the International Herald Tribune into the International New York Times complete, Thompson said the focus would now turn to expanding NYT’s brand into Asia and retaining as many IHT subscribers as possible. NYT and INYT will also have one global advertising team, which will reduce the cost of maintaining two separate teams.
Also read: New York Times Sells Boston Globe to Red Sox Owner John Henry
Rent
NYT plans to rent out an additional floor of its building. “We believe we can successfully run the New York Times with one less floor,” Thompson said.
Ink
If you’ve got an ad to run that takes full advantage of blank space, NYT wants to hear from you! Thompson noted that a recent two-page ad for “The Book Thief,” which was almost completely blank, “saved us a fortune in ink.”