• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, September 11, 2006

The New York Times is now making its entire Web site content available on mobile phones and PDAs with Web-surfing capabilities.

The service, which is ad-supported, allows users to scroll through and access full text versions of stories across all of the site's sections. Users who log in as registered members will also be able to email stories to friends from the mobile platform.

The launch advertisers, Microsoft Windows Mobile, will have an exclusive position until the end of the first contract term next May, said Alyson Racer, vice president of advertising for NYTimes.com. For now, the Times is keeping ad formats on the site simple. "Right now it's a straight banner with click-through type model," Racer said.

The paper is experimenting with a variety of ad formats, Racer said, and intends to introduce some new formats in the future. The schedule for rollout of these new formats is not yet decided.

Racer also said that Microsoft also received extensive exposure as the site's sponsor in a co-branded announcement of the service in Friday's paper edition of The New York Times.

Additional features planned for the near future include real-time access to weather, stocks, sports scores, and movie showtimes. The Times' research staff is also working to delineate specific niche audiences within the site's overall readership, according to Racer, who said the mobile service would then target them with customized news products: "We're looking for niche audiences and we're going to be developing more mobile content, like entertainment, technology, a whole series of things."

Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell Inc., a consulting group that serves the information industry including newspapers, said the move was "definitely the right direction." "The old New York Times site took forever to load on my Treo, just to get all the code on board. The new site loads much quicker, and you have a less cluttered experience."