Time.com’s strategy of emphasizing content niches seems to be working

paidcontent reporting:

The value of being a weekly print brand in the online era has been in doubt for years, but Time magazine believes that it can retain relevance by not just emphasizing the Time the brand online, but ramping up attention a lot more on news niches, creating blogs around key topics to maintain web traffic between the spikes related to its traditional coverage of big events. Gadget-and-gaming Techland, politically minded Swampland, military news Battleland and nine other blogs infuse this version of Time.com, with more to come.

Before the end of the year, Time.com plans to add an entertainment blog, an opinion site with guest bloggers and possibly ones about society and family, as well as criminal justice. The moves are part of the “vertical strategy,” which began about two years ago, said Jim Frederick, the site’s managing editor, in an interview with paidContent.

Time also says that digital revenue is up 12 percent so far, though it declined to provide dollar figures. The magazine’s executives point to sponsorships from Goldman Sachs and Ally Financial’s launch sponsorship of Time.com’s finance vertical Moneyland and Starbucks (NSDQ: SBUX) for the launch of the LightBox photography blog on Tumblr.
“In developing the vertical strategy, we decided to pinpoint areas of reader and advertiser interest, blow them out as mini-publications in their own right,” Frederick said. “The idea was to get writers who can speak to Tech enthusiasts for Techland or personal finance fans at Moneyland, and forge new readerships, while still embracing our core audience and feeling familiar to our Time loyalists, too.””
...Beyond the site: In addition to the website verticals, Time is looking to other digital extensions. A month before the July rollout of Time magazine’s all-access iPad app subscription plan, it introduced a companion item on the device: The Page: Mark Halperin 2012 App for iPad, a free, separate app that offers political analysis from the veteran political reporter with ExxonMobil as the exclusive sponsor at its launch.
And from the PC and mobile screen, the magazine is hoping that connected TVs will provide another opportunity to plant the brand’s flag. Its first free widget on the Samsung TV platform has seen over 25,000 app downloads in the first two weeks. The Samsung TV app has video and photos in the full screen mode and it can also be used widget mode to read the Time content while watching live TV on connected Samsung sets. At the moment, people may not be clamoring to read the news on their TVs, but if the connected set is the intersection of traditional media and new, Time wants to be ready.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-time.com-vertical-strategy-downplays-the-brand-to-deliver-more-traffic-