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The content and revenue lessons from The Atlantic’s turnaround

The Atlantic’s three-year turnaround shows how publishers can successfully pivot away from the traffic strategies of the platform era.

14th March 2025

In three years, the Atlantic was able to go from losing $20 m in a year to making a profit. Image courtesy of The Atlantic

During the platform era, publishers could hold onto the belief that little had changed in mass media. Search and social attracted audiences that dwarfed the ones they had had in the past, fuelling ad revenue that would support their existing businesses and drive future growth.

The problem was that the platforms captured most of the revenue and left the media with crumbs. A strategic pivot from chasing digital traffic to delivering high-quality, differentiated content that audiences are willing to pay for is difficult to execute, but we now have a successful model that shows how this pivot to value works. The Atlantic in the US now boasts more than 1m subscribers and went from “broke to profitable in three years”, as the Wall Street Journal put it.

Their success provides lessons for other publishers as they pursue profitability and growth.

Producing higher quality, highly differentiated content, but less of it.
A focus on subscription growth while also developing other revenue sources, such as events.
Flexible paywall and pricing strategies based on different products and different audiences.

What’s exciting about The Atlantic’s success is that it shows resilience in the face of relentless change in media, including the emergence of AI. They are focused on building and sustaining direct relationships with audiences and on original reporting and content that will be augmented but not supplanted by AI.

If you’d like to discuss these strategies with other publishing professionals focused on mobile success, join our community, Mobile Matters, here. In addition to joining our Slack workspace, we also hold workshops with Mobile Matters members. The next one will be a discussion about push notification best practices with Airship and Leah Becerra about her experiences as senior digital editor at the Boston Globe. You can sign up here to join.

Print under stress but models for success appearing

By James Kember and Kevin Anderson

The Press Gazette recently highlighted the challenges US magazine publishers face. Combined print and digital circulation across the top 50 US magazine titles fell by 3.6% year-on-year, driven in part by a 5% fall in print circulation acting as a drag on (some) increases in digital revenue, according to data from the Alliance for Audited Media.

Print has dented the results of many magazine publishers, and digital has supported growth at others. However, it is not a simple story of print in decline and digital in the ascendency. Titles such as Sports Illustrated, People and Entertainment Weekly all struggled to maintain their digital subscriber base, but many have fared better.

The Atlantic stands out, particularly for its dramatic turnaround. When CEO Nicholas Thompson joined the magazine in December 2020, it had a $20m deficit and had to lay off 17% of its staff. In March 2024, it topped 1 m subscribers and announced that it was profitable.

And it continues to grow. The monthly magazine saw an impressive increase in its digital circulation (up 17%) and print (up 12%). Overall, they achieved an impressive 15% growth, putting them at the top of the pile for US magazines. And it translated directly into revenue, with subscriptions up by 15% and revenue up 10%, topping $100m.

A focus on high-quality journalism with a diversified content strategy

The Atlantic’s turnaround shows how a publisher can pivot from chasing traffic to high-value journalism that audiences are willing to pay for. For a time in the last decade, they tried a daily digital news strategy and hired a breaking news team, following a model that made Buzzfeed and Vice digital media darlings, for a time. “It worked until it didn’t,” Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg told the Wall Street Journal.

Its content strategy returned to producing in-depth, thoughtful, and well-researched articles on a wide range of topics, such as politics, culture, science, and technology. Goldberg described this as their “total quality model on the web”, and in a world of free content, it has given them a USP in the battle for attention. As the expansion of AI inevitably continues, they are well-positioned with this approach.

This approach has involved more than just writing long-form articles, and they’ve expanded how they present their content to create as broad an appeal as possible. While they produce non-text content such as podcasts, they also leaned into newsletters in 2021 when they hired nine newsletter writers. This acknowledgement that producing content in different formats can often require a different approach has allowed them to build habit and loyalty with their audience.

Thompson said when he joined, he wanted to know how much people would be willing to pay for this quality content and has since raised prices by 50%. Their subscriptions keep growing, and their churn rate has remained low.

Dynamic paywalls and pricing

In 2019, when the traffic-based digital model ceased to work, The Atlantic launched a metered paywall with a simple trio of subscription plans: digital, print and digital premium. The premium tier offered product discounts and priority access to events alongside the content, something that other magazines such as Hearst’s Elle have seen success with their membership offering, the Collective.

Subscriptions now account for two-thirds of The Atlantic’s revenue. However, its content strategy has not only enhanced its ability to sell subscriptions, it has also improved its advertising offering. In 2024, Editor in Chief Goldberg pointed out that booked advertising was up 33% year-on-year.

Their next evolution of this approach is to build a dynamic paywall model which leverages data from a reader’s behaviour on site to determine how to price the subscription. This is designed primarily to increase ARPU (average revenue per user) while ensuring that the publication doesn’t lose subscribers to overly high prices. It uses a “smart meter” that sets a price between $60 and $100 and targets likely subscribers based on their actions, such as the amount of content consumed and past behaviour.

The paywall is also flexible to allow for adjustments based on the amount of advertising sold and ensure they hit their impression targets. When they need to increase the number of ad impressions, the paywall can be loosened so that unsubscribed readers can navigate more freely and rack up page views. Described as “almost like a dance” by their Chief Growth Officer Megha Garibaldi, The Atlantic is seeking to solve the common publisher problem of balancing revenue from both subscriptions and advertising.

Personalised pricing won’t just be for new subscribers but renewals, too, with the team hoping that the dynamic approach will improve renewal rates. If they believe a subscriber is more likely to churn or less likely to renew, they have the flexibility to price accordingly.

However, this approach is not without its challenges, particularly in the dance of balancing subscription conversion and retention and advertising revenue. Small changes in the paywall and pricing could increase conversion but increase churn. To be successful, it will need to be closely monitored, which is why The Atlantic have made it clear that it plans to continue to test and optimise.

The Atlantic has succeeded in building both print and digital products where others have struggled, largely because they’ve focused on building a quality product and have delivered it to their audiences in innovative ways. By continuing to adapt, they have reached profitability, and their new cake-and-eat-it paywall, if targeted carefully, should allow them to avoid having to decide between advertising and subscription, whilst increasing revenue from all cohorts of readers.

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