Copyright Adweek
The New York Times unveiled a new Watch tab in its flagship app on Tuesday, a mobile-native destination for vertical video that marks a significant expansion from the publisher into visual journalism. The swipeable video feed, which has been available to a small cohort of users for several weeks, will feature short-form clips spanning The Times’ portfolio—News, Opinion, Cooking, Wirecutter, and The Athletic—curated and refreshed throughout the day. The product marks the first time a major publisher has introduced a dedicated tab for vertical video within its own app, signaling how seriously The Times is treating the medium as a core storytelling format rather than an off-platform experiment. “We’ve transformed our journalism to be multimedia,” said Joy Robins, global chief advertising officer of The New York Times, “and the Watch tab is the next evolution of how we provide users a destination to engage with our video.” The launch caps a period of rapid transformation for The Times, which has spent the past three years recasting its newsroom as a multimedia engine. After years of investing in audio, visuals, and documentary work, the publisher now produces roughly 75 hours of professionally made video each month, according to the company. Video consumption across its platforms has more than doubled year over year, and viewers now stream hundreds of millions of minutes of Times-produced clips monthly. The new tab arrives seven months after the company introduced a Listen tab and just weeks after announcing the shutdown of its standalone Audio app, the features of which are being folded into the main News app experience. Together, the updates turn The Times’ app into a single home for text, video, and audio—an integrated ecosystem that mirrors how audiences already consume content across devices and platforms. Engagement before monetization Unlike TikTok or Instagram Reels, Watch will launch without advertising or algorithmic personalization, according to Robins. For now, the goal is to learn how subscribers interact with short-form video—what they watch, finish, and return to—before introducing marketing opportunities. The unique combination of a vertical video feed without an algorithm will offer an interesting case study into how engaging the format is without the machine learning of TikTok and Reels. The feed also lacks signal providers, such as likes or comments, that social platforms use to gauge user interest. For videos that are previews of full-length content available elsewhere on the app, like stories, podcasts, or full-length videos, users can click through the text at the bottom of the vertical video to discover the original content. In this way, the feed serves as a recirculation and content discovery engine, in addition to a means of engagement. The Times plans to open the format to a small group of beta advertisers in 2026, Robins said. That rollout will build on lessons from its Games app, where vertical interstitial ads have achieved 80% to 90% viewability and significant brand-lift improvements, according to the publisher. The content format, combined with The Times’ editorial capability, could make an enticing pitch for marketers, according to Digital Remedy chief revenue officer Matt Fanelli, whose company helps publishers monetize vertical video. “As audiences spend more time in immersive, short-form environments, marketers are seeking formats that deliver both engagement and performance, not just reach,” Fanelli said. “For publishers, it opens a new avenue for monetization, pairing storytelling with inventory that’s native, high-impact, and built for how people actually consume content today.” NYT Advertising expects to bring those learnings to Watch, offering brands an environment where they can reuse social assets and launch campaigns within 48 hours, without custom builds or lengthy approval cycles. The ad strategy mirrors The Times’ broader product philosophy: move slowly, learn deeply, then scale, according to Robins. A curated feed built for discovery The Watch tab will rely on human curation rather than algorithmic ranking, reflecting The Times’ preference for editorial judgment over machine-driven personalization. The feed will surface a mix of investigations, visual essays, cultural commentary, and lifestyle coverage, designed to expose users to the full breadth of The Times’ journalism rather than confine them to familiar topics. That approach differentiates the product from social platforms and underscores the publisher’s focus on discovery and editorial range. It’s also the latest development The Times has made to build its own controlled environment rather than rely on services like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels to reach audiences. It previously launched Listen to make audio native to its app. Together, these changes illustrate a strategy that prioritizes owned distribution, immersive formats, and a premium user experience over reach on third-party platforms. “What’s exciting for us is that our advertising business is doing really well without video,” Robins said. “This represents a disciplined opportunity to grow, one that follows our product evolution and gives both consumers and advertisers a quality place to watch.”
