Good News About Old Media: How The Atlantic Went Digital

[stonetools]

There is a lot of talk about how the old print media is doomed and is fated to go the way of the dinosaur. Here is some good news about how a venerable member of the print media "evolved" into a sucessful new media company:

Inside The Atlantic: How One Magazine Got Profitable by Going ‘Digital First’

With consecutive quarterly growth in both print and digital advertising sales, The Atlantic has emerged as a vanguard in an industry harassed by declining ad revenues and falling circulations. And the credit, its executives say, belongs to the “digital first” strategy it embraced four years ago.

The Atlantic, a monthly magazine on politics, foreign affairs, economics and culture, made $1.8 million in 2010, its first profitable year in decades. In October, digital ad revenues topped print for the first time, up 86% year-over-year, but not at the sacrifice of print. In fact, The Atlantic sold more print ads in October than it had in any other month since David Bradley acquired the title in 1999. Traffic to its three web properties — TheAtlantic.com, TheAtlanticWire.com and TheAtlanticCities.com — recently surpassed 11 million uniques per month, up a staggering 2500% since The Atlantic brought down its paywall in early 2008.

LINK

So the transition from print first to digital first can be done. The story is significant for me because I am a longtime print subscriber to The Atlantic. Despite their success, I do think their Ios magazine app kind of sucks, so they have more work to do. The good news is that they'll be around to do it.

[Kevin8or]

I love this magazine. Thanks for the link.

[JeremyR]

Of course the thing is, The Atlantic has certain demographics that makes this possible - rich elites, especially those with ties to the government (DC is basically the only area in the country that has had massive growth, thanks to all the added government spending).

[6charlong]

Originally Posted by JeremyR

Of course the thing is, The Atlantic has certain demographics that makes this possible - rich elites, especially those with ties to the government (DC is basically the only area in the country that has had massive growth, thanks to all the added government spending).

I don't think The Atlantic Magazine is published just for rich elites. A Kindle subscription costs $2.45 per month. Not the cheapest magazine subscription but not the most expensive either. I'm not a subscriber and I'm not rich but I've borrowed copies of The Atlantic from our local library. They print some interesting material on all sorts of topics.

[wizwor]

It's certainly not mainstream. Circulation is less than a half million. They claim...

Average HHI: $118,038
HHI $250,000+: 12%
College grad +: 87%
Post-graduate degree: 45%

A lot of ipad owners in that demo. Not hard to imagine these people ponying up print fees for an e-offering. Probably not even read by most

The test for Big Media is broad distribution publications. Frankly, I think they are going away. They combine wires with local news and their own OpEd. It's too easy to get the wire stories from a free provider, local papers/bloggers are already covering the local stories better, and people are relying on bloggers for OpEd. The NYT is the barometer. Their readership has dropped to less than 1,000,000 for the first time since the 80s, they are selling off all the regional papers they invested in, and no one is paying for their electronic offering.

This ins't a bad thing. I see the future as ad supported aggregators of a broad sampling of special interest publishers, local news, and commentary. You don't need a building in NYC or Chicago to do that.