For New York Times, a Gamble on Giveaways

The New York Times NYT Now mobile app is now free.

The change signaled a shift in digital strategy at the Times toward courting young readers with free content rather than trying to turn them into subscribers right away. That approach has the Times experimenting, to varying degrees, with making its content available across a multitude of platforms, from Facebook’s Instant Articles program to Apple’s coming News app to messaging platform WhatsApp and even on Starbucks’s mobile app. The moves, however, leave the Times with a delicate balancing act: The paper is trying to boost its Web and mobile audience to bolster ad sales without undermining a steadily growing digital subscription business that has drawn almost one million customers and contributed 11% of the company’s revenue