NYTimes Finds 850 New Ways To Sell Subscriptions

From Rick Edmonds, poynter.org:

For more than a year, coverage of the New York Times as a business has been relentlessly about its “metered model” pay wall and other digital matters. But without any media news notice, the newspaper has engineered a coup on the legacy side of its operations.

Essentially, it has replaced telemarketing as a source of selling new subscriptions with “events marketing” — pitching a booth at a well-trafficked venue like the U.S. Open tennis tournament or the South by Southwest conference in Austin and trying to sign up passers-by.

The new sales channel has grown from a handful of local events like the U.S. Open in the mid-2000s to 850 last year, a little over a third in New York and the rest national.

Ray Pearce, the Times’s vice president of circulation, declined in a phone interview to say just how many new subs the program is yielding — but it is surely in the tens of thousands. Pearce said that events have become the second largest sales channel after the Web and that the program will expand further in 2011.

Like the rest of the industry, Pearce said, the New York Times found that selling subscriptions by phone became less effective and much more expensive as the federal “do-not-call” registry was put in place.

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