NYT's latest strategy

I guess if you can't beat them join them....

SAI today had this post about NYT's efforts to gain more traffic from posting the most prurient of interests. A nasty divorce, and a video that exposes the husband's dark side.

What's most interesting to me is that the video in question has had over 2.6 M views so far. YouTube is kind enough tell you the top five sites that link to the video. Currently Four are aol articles, and one is comcast. Perhaps NYT is not getting credit for the traffic, but if they are, the impact is under 50,000 views.

That is not a whole lot of upside for the potential downside on the brand. I do think they handled the situation in a very New York Times way, commenting on how public formerly private matters have become in this era.