We know how enriching it can be to share articles with friends and family, but we also know that not everyone has a Times subscription. We are excited to introduce gift articles for Times subscribers , which allows news subscribers to share up to 10 articles each month. Anyone who is sent a gift article will be able to read it, regardless of whether they subscribe to The Times; gift articles will not count towards the monthly free-article limit for non-subscribers.
Times subscribers are the biggest advocates for our journalism. By enabling them to more freely share our content with family and friends, we hope to make it easier for them to have meaningful conversations around the stories we publish. Through our research, we found that readers were more likely to engage with journalism that had been shared by someone they know rather than a company account. With gift articles, we hope to increase sharing, as well as bring in new audiences.
In early research studies, we learned that the vast majority of Times subscribers said that allowing friends and family to read the links they share would add value to their subscription overall.
These insights gave us the confidence that building gift articles would meet a user need, grow our audience and add distinct value to a Times subscription. As we began thinking about the new feature, we knew that making sure subscribers could find, understand and use it easily was extremely important. We spent some time developing rough user journeys that would encourage subscribers to share and reassure recipients that they would be able to freely read the full articles.
These user journeys allowed our team to get on the same page about where and when this option would appear. But, they raised a number of questions about how we should describe the feature and how it would work. Fortunately, we had the chance to conduct user research, which helped us think through how to frame the new feature. In the test, we hypothesized that the ability to share unlocked articles would encourage more sharing overall. However, for this test we wanted the articles to be freely available to non-subscribers; we still asked, but did not require, recipients to register for Times accounts.
These considerations led us to measure the percentage of subscriber sessions that resulted in a share and the percentage of shares that resulted in registration. Subscribers can find the gift button alongside other social and email share options. The New York Times tested the idea with a subset of users back in Based on how often those initial subscribers used the feature and feedback they solicited through user research , the Times decided to roll it out more widely.
Mancusi said it was too early to determine whether gift recipients were more likely to convert to subscribers, but said the Times could already say they were, at least, more likely to cough up their email to register at nytimes.
Illustration by Viktoriia Liutova used under a Creative Commons license. Cite this article Hide citations. Scire, Sarah. Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 22 Jun. Scire, S. Nieman Journalism Lab. Last modified June 22, Accessed November 12, The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age. June 22, , 2 p. Anna Mancusi. New York Times. Subscribers can use a new button to share gift articles to any platform.
With every article gifted, the monthly gift article count will decrease by one article, as reflected in the panel. Gift articles do not count toward the monthly article limit, but unregistered users will see a skippable registration prompt. Once activated, each gift article will be available to the recipient for 14 days.
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