The New York Times’ new app strategy seems lackluster at best — so what does it do now?

gigaom / Matthew Ingram reporting:
Among the other less-than-optimistic news from the New York Times in its quarterly earnings report earlier this week — the fall in revenue, continued slide in advertising income, and so on — the company also announced some numbers related to its new mobile apps, NYT Now and NYT Opinion. Unfortunately for the Times, the apps have so far failed to set the mobile world on fire. In fact, when looked at in relative terms, they have more or less disappeared without a trace.
As Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Journalism Review and analyst Ken Doctor have described, the Times reported that it added a total of 32,000 digital subscribers in the second quarter — a number that includes all the people who signed up for digital access to the newspaper, as well as those who paid for NYT Now, NYT Opinion and Times Premier, a service that gives subscribers access to members-only discussions and other customized features.
The Times didn’t break out any specific numbers for the apps, but it did say that they and Times Premier accounted for the bulk of the 32,000 number, which for a major international media entity is a vanishingly small figure — even Chittum, who has been an unabashed fan of the NYT’s various paywall strategies, admitted that the company’s new offerings are “off to a poor start.” The NYT Now app doesn’t even show up in the list of top 1,000 apps for the iPhone, and is ranked fairly low in the media category as well...
...So what happens now? As Doctor points out, even with the paywall revenue, the Times is still taking on water faster than it can bail the boat: print-advertising revenue fell another 6.6 percent in the most recent quarter, and all of the digital growth barely managed to fill a fraction of that gap — $42 million in revenue from the paper’s digital-only products was a tenth of the Times‘ overall revenue of about $400 million, the bulk of which comes from print advertising.
...For my part, I think the Times might want to experiment with highly personal apps — either by offering high levels of customization for readers, or even by offering apps that are dedicated to a single NYT writer such as Nicholas Kristof: a kind of central portal for all that writer’s content, with customized levels of engagement for users...
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