Apple owns New York Times?
Apple does not, in fact, own the New York Times. For the entire day, however, the Times website has featured an overly prominent Apple advertisement. Much like an earlier Apple ad that appeared on several and tech sites, this ad is comprised of two interacting panels. The side panel feature John Hodgman and Justin Long doing the whole Mac vs. PC thing, and the top panel features some stationary text. Near the end of the both ad, however, Apple blows your mind by having the characters from the side panel interact with the text in the top panel. This reveals that they are actually part of the same ad (in the first two-panel Apple ad, the panels weren’t even touching, so this revelation was a genuine surprise).
The problem big problem the New York Times ad is that the top panel text looks just like a full page headline. It’s in a serif font and it’s a quote from the Wall Street Journal. It reads just like actual news. Being Apple/Internet obsessed, I was already familiar with this style of Apple ad, I’m worried how the average person perceives the ad? If someone doesn’t bother to turn on the ad’s sound, and doesn’t spend 20+ seconds watching the entire ad, how are they even supposed to know that the quote/headline is part of the ad? When someone doesn’t figure this out, it’s basically like Apple paid the New York Times to put up a headline about how great their operating system is.
Would the New York Times ever do this sort of thing in print? I doubt it. Would they let Fidelity, for example, pay them to put up the headline “Fidelity’s Magellan Fund outperforms the S&P 500″? I seriously hope not. If they are letting Apple put up a headline on their website, it means one of two things. Either the New York Times is seriously desperate for cash (in which case I hope they made a fortune off this ad), or they view their website as being significantly less important than the print edition. I read the New York Times everyday, but like many people I know, I almost never read it in print. Come to think of it, I don’t even know where it’s sold in Providence.
According to Wikipedia, nytimes.com gets about 13 million unique visitors per month. The paper’s average daily circulation is about 1.2 million. For many people, it’s the website that matters most. The New York Times should acknowledge this by selecting its web advertisements more carefully. In the meantime, I hope I’m not the only blogger that encourages the Times’ to do so.
