New York Times (NYT) Launches MyTimes. Cool, But Ten Years Too Late
The New York Times continues to add to its impressive online site, rolling out a "MyTimes" feature today that has been behind a beta wall since last year. The feature looks slick: Customizable widget boxes featuring …
Context & Ripple Effects
MyTimes is the second major digital product push The New York Times has made this year: in March 2007 it announced Times Reader, a subscription version of the paper bundled free with home delivery, and today it graduates the MyTimes personalization feature out of a year-long beta onto NYTimes.com. The pickup was broad — Business Wire, Read/WriteWeb and First Look all carried the same-day launch.
Commentary around the launch is skeptical on timing rather than execution: critics call the widget-based start page cool but roughly ten years behind the personalization curve that portal incumbents already defined. That framing matters because it positions the Times as a fast-follower in a category someone else invented.
First-order effects
- NYTimes.com visitors get a customizable widget-box start page, giving the Times a stickier daily touchpoint to compete for attention against portal start pages like My Yahoo.
- The Times' March 2007 Times Reader subscription play and MyTimes now form a two-track digital strategy: paid dedicated client plus free personalized web surface.
Second-order effects
- Portal players whose start-page model MyTimes imitates face a newspaper publisher courting the same habit of making one site your default morning view — raising the bar for how much customization free news sites must offer.
Third-order effects
- If legacy publishers keep cloning platform features years after their debut, the pattern points toward newspaper websites competing on software experience rather than editorial alone — and toward internal R&D groups becoming the mechanism for catching up, though whether fast-following can ever leapfrog the original platforms is genuinely unresolved.
The trend: Legacy news publishers are belatedly absorbing the portal-era personalization playbook, arriving as fast-followers in categories the big internet platforms defined years earlier.