The Atlantic Turns a Profit, With an Eye on the Web | Hacker News Reader

The Atlantic Turns a Profit, With an Eye on the Web

nytimes.com

78 pointsJ3L240430 comments

> Advertising salespeople were told it did not matter what percentage of their sales were digital and what percentage print; they just needed to hit one sales target.

How is this not absolutely, positively common sense in 2010? I could understand in 1999, getting more people to advertize on your website could accomplish some internal goal but in 2010, why does anything other than at actual dollar amount matter?

The legacy media has an emotional connection to their old business, because it is the source of their power and privilege. If they kill the paper edition they would be a website and they don't invite writers from web sites to dinners at the White House or the best Manhattan parties. They don't give Pulitzers to web sites. They don't make movies about courageous whistle blowing web masters. Columbia doesn't do lectures for people who run web sites.

Perhaps most importantly, legacy media knows it is superior to websites, and doesn't feel the need to treat you as a professional colleague or peer publication if you aren't on dead tree. They'll happily just lift your stuff or ignore it. Want to get a job with them? Pfft, you ran a website? Darling, this is the New York Times. We hire journalists here.

> They don't give Pulitzers to web sites.

Actually, they do.

* http://www.propublica.org/awards/item/pulitzer-prize-in-inve...

* http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/apr/20/...

> Columbia doesn't do lectures for people who run web sites.

CUNY does.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/12/01/cunys-entrepreneurial-...

That said, CUNY is playing upstart here.

I think Patrick's post was decidedly tongue-in-cheek.

His comment is closer to true taken straight than taken tongue-in-cheek.

Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, I had never heard of the Atlantic until I started seeing article's of it linked all over the place in the blogo-sphere. Seems to me that this common sense theme perhaps is permeating to the marketing department who feel that getting eyes on their articles is worth far more than trying to track down every Tom, Dick, and Harry to take more than 5 sentences from an article whilst providing a link back to the source.

This is the first time "in at least a decade" the magazine was profitable, so this common sense might be worth noting to the establishment. Some elements in this type of business must still be psychologically adjusting to the ocean of choice that people now have.

Whereas before it was a question of what of a finite number magazines or finite channels, showing finite programs, you chose to buy with your definitely finite dollars, now it is more of a question of what media, usually free, do you consume with you increasingly finite time. Choice used to always be something that you paid for and now it is often free. Where before you money was the scarcity now it is effectively you time.

There are precious few people who can both blog and write long-form well. The Atlantic employs three: Andrew Sullivan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and James Fallows.

I don't understand the Wire, and they've done some crazy redesign things that they've had to roll back (writer blogs didn't have permalinks for about a week earlier), so I'm quite skeptical that this was just about finding a new business model. In my opinion, they made exceptionally smart editorial decisions that allowed them to pull this off.

James Fallows is a beast. He's featured on the cover of the magazine with an in-depth article every other month, contributes short articles each issue and updates his blog regularly. The long-form articles must each take years of research; his recent clean-coal piece hinted at at least four. A bit of estimation suggests that Mr. Fallows is running ~10 non-trivial article-length projects at a go, in addition to his PBS pieces and books.

Fallows is the closest thing the U.S. has to a public intellectual.

for those who ain't seen it, an obligatory link to Fallows on "Living With a Computer" from July 1982: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/07/living-w... (what fun he was having!)

I'd never seen that, but wow, what a fascinating article.

they've done some crazy redesign things that they've had to roll back (writer blogs didn't have permalinks for about a week earlier)

Wild speculation, of course, but perhaps they're doing incremental design and playing with A/B/multivariate testing to see what works? They have the traffic to pull it off.

No, all hell broke loose: http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/02/for-the-...

In short, none of this was intentional. It was all intuitive.

It's a shame, but it's easy to see why they're starting to succeed merely through how open, honest, and downright charming this apology is.

Megan McArdle is a fourth.

Crap, I downvoted your comment in error - I meant to upvote it.

Any time HN wants to remove the 'feature' that prevents users from changing votes, that would be great.

It's really interesting that two of the (only?) magazines that seem to be doing well are the very intellectually focused Atlantic and Economist right now. Ironically this is a piece in Atlantic about the Economist's success: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/07/the-news...

Outside of the US, Monocle - http://www.monocle.com/ - is doing very well and is similarly intellectual. It was founded by Tyler Brule, the guy who founded the similarly successful Wallpaper in the 90s. It's like The Economist meets Vanity Fair and describes itself as "a global briefing covering international affairs, business, culture and design." I love it. New York Magazine ran a feature all about it and its model just a week ago: http://nymag.com/news/media/69921/

An even more successful one is Germany's Der Spiegel - they employ about 380 people and run a pretty intellectual ship. They have entire sections of their building dedicated to things like the "fact checking department" and such. Turning a profit with such a large ship either shows how good they are or how loyal Germans are to their flagship magazines..

God yes. I've been a subscriber since about the begining. Tyler has a very no bullshit view on business - real business done well. The first issue had an interview with the CEO of lego, they regularly feature small business and leaders in their video series.

He also has a fantastic eye for style (not surprising), more people should aspire to his level.

It's the first I hear of Monocle. I'll check it out, thanks.

The Economist is successful because the content can be useful for professionals. It gives you a great weekly snapshot of geopolitica/global economic events and commentary. So you can expense it to your employer.

I know of a few big global macro hedge fund managers that actually get investment ideas from articles they find in it.

Prior to its reinvention of itself, my primary exposure to the Atlantic was as the original publisher of Vannevar Bush's prophetic article As We May Think:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/as-we-ma...

(NB: the timestamp says 1969, presumably because there's some code somewhere which isn't expecting a timestamp from prior to 1970-01-01)

It seems fitting that the publisher of an article that so accurately predicted so much future technology should be keen to embrace it.

It is funny how they do not mention how the Atlantic takes payments from potential subjects of their stories (i.e., bribes).

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/not_just_w...

They do mention the conferences although not in this light. Interesting.

According to the article they're projected to make $6.1 million in revenue for the year. I'm estimating they'll have received 300 million page views over this period of time based of Quantcast and figures from the article. This means they're making about $0.02 per page view, which seems high to me. Is this a somewhat believable number that's inline with industry averages?

I've heard news sites make $7-10 CPM. Is this per ad, but they show multiple ads, so they make more like $20RPM in total (which would line up with my estimates)?

I don't think I have ever read an issue of The Atlantic. This article alone is fantastic press for them.

Can't get past the login page :/

Sorry for all of my chrome junk in the url:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

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