Quartz Vertical Launches, Atlantic Membership Drive, Scribd-NYT Subscription Bundle, Axel Springer’s Upday Traffic, Media Metrics, InDesign Tip: Creating Balanced Headlines

Welcome to Technology for Publishing’s roundup of news, stories of interest, and tips for media industry pros! This week, we’re sharing posts about Quartz vertical launches aimed at bringing in new revenue streams, The Atlantic’s plan to draw more subscribers, content service Scribd’s partnership with The New York Times, Axel Springer’s success with the Upday news app, and more.

  • As WWD reports, Quartz publisher Jay Lauf thinks there’s a lot of untapped opportunity out there for digital publishers: “Fashion and beauty advertisers have not moved as rapidly to digital. There is all this money that has not shifted to digital…there are not enough safe harbors.” Hence the publisher’s launch of two new verticals, style and fashion site Quartzy and business management site At Work, both aimed at opening avenues to new advertisers, and potentially live events and e-commerce. Designed to provide a “full-page magazine ad experience” as well as swipeable ad stacks, the site will also feature sponsored content, including video, according to the article. “It’s very ambitious in terms of the revenue we expect to drive at launch and through the year, ” Lauf says.
  • Quartz parent The Atlantic is going after new revenue sources as well, recently launching a $100-per-year membership program for its “diehard” readers, says a Nieman Lab post. The program, also focused on increasing engagement, is called The Masthead, providing subscribers with access to Atlantic editors and writers, along with exclusive stories and updates, “behind-the-scenes dispatches,” event discounts, and a members-only Facebook group, the article notes. “We have this core audience of Atlantic diehards who just love The Atlantic, and…then we have this much larger new audience of people who discovered us digitally, who aren’t core, who’ve come through social and read a piece or two,” says Atlantic president Bob Cohn. “We really want to establish more of a connection with them.”
  • Betting that “subscription fatigue” is starting to set in among readers, Scribd—the “Netflix for text”—announced a new subscription bundle that will include The New York Times and other top news outlets. CEO Trip Adler tells Poynter, “We wanted to start offering subscriptions together as a package. That way you can just pay one subscription fee and get multiple services.” Scribd and the Times will share revenue, according to the article, which notes the service currently has nearly 500,000 users and partnerships with news orgs including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Fortune, and Bloomberg.
  • At Axel Springer, news app Upday is drawing some 13 million users, helping the German publisher and other news outlets across Europe to better compete against the Facebook-Google duopoly, Digiday says. Since its launch in March 2016, Upday has doubled the number of publishers it works with—now totaling 3,500—and is responsible for nearly 4 million visits to their sites per day. Going forward, the report notes, the focus will go from expanding reach to driving up time spent in the app. Part of that strategy will be to customize content based on individual users’ interests, it says.

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Image: WWD

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Posted by: Monica Sambataro

Monica Sambataro
Monica Sambataro is a contributing editor and copyeditor for Technology for Publishing. Her publishing background includes work for leading technology- and business-related magazines and websites.
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