The Atlantic Looks to More Profitable Events Among Other Things to Prepare for Traffic Declines

By: Christiana Sciaudone

The Atlantic will lean more into profitable events in 2025.

Leaning into in-person gatherings, which has become the thing to do post-pandemic, is one of several strategies that the magazine is planning as it continues to build on its recent return to profitability and reach of 1 million readers.

“There’s infinite capacity for, or there’s infinite demand for life events,” Chief Executive Officer Nicholas Thompson told AMO. “We’re doing it slowly and in a sophisticated way that gives us money, gives us higher profits. But there’s a lot more revenue there.”

The Atlantic has done a generally impressive job of turning the ship around financially, with stories from the Wall Street Journal, Press Gazette and CNN Business highlighting the accomplishments. The profitability and circulation (up about 20% from when Thompson took over) make for good headlines, but more work needs to be done to maintain sustainability—and while The Atlantic is less susceptible to being burned by a drop in traffic, it’s Thompson’s biggest nightmare.

While subscriptions have risen at a time when traffic from Google and social has slumped across publications, “the biggest risk that I can specifically point to, and I’m certain, is happening, is a catastrophic decline in traffic, and that is going to happen. It is happening and it will happen, and we have to prevent that from… we have to minimize the impact on our business. And so that is a strategic planning question.”

The Atlantic will seek to get more traffic from answer engines, ie, AI chat tools, and develop direct relationships with readers in an attempt to navigate a visibility crisis.

How they got here

When Thompson took over in 2021, circulation was 833,000, the focus was on traffic, ads were more programmatic and the subscription price was $50. Subscriptions now start at $80 and revenue last year neared $100 million. Ads and sponsorships are more curated and less dependent on programmatic, and paywalls are smarter. About 65% of revenue comes from subscriptions, 28% from ads and sponsorship and a small amount from IP, syndication and other items. 

Thompson had been watching the publication during the pandemic and was impressed with the “awesome publication with amazing writers and great stories.”

But they also had layoffs, and that didn’t make sense to him. Thompson whipped it into shape pretty quickly, all things considered (see: slumps in traffic from Google and social media), and the CEO says it all just comes down to:

It’s the content, the good content, the good writers, like if you have great writers, great stories, and then you execute properly on the product side and links to the revenue side. No question about it.

Also very helpful in driving subscriptions: 46% of The Atlantic’s readership has a household income of more than $150,000, meaning more disposable income to spend on small luxuries. The average reader is aged 47, so theoretically well-established in their careers. The largest percentages of the audience are 73% white, 11% Black and 6% Asian. 

Thompson has yet to establish a new goal in terms of readership, and is hoping for a bump in the number of subscribers to help push revenue forward. The ad business as a whole could also expand, as could syndication partnerships.

“What I continue to seek is a sort of step function change, creating a new business that makes tons of money. I tried at one point to create an AI-driven social platform that would make conversations better. We sold it off,” Thompson said. “That was a big bet that ended up neutral, right? Like, everybody ended up fine, but nobody made money, nobody really lost money. But you can imagine another big bet like that.”  

The Atlantic will continue with AI experiments creating tools like new search engines, education experiences and browser extensions, among others.

And with a middle-aged reader base, The Atlantic is also on the prowl for younger readers. 

“Younger people over index on audio. So if you notice, we’ve expanded our audio efforts, podcasting the story. Younger people obviously over index on social media. So we have social media efforts, including vertical video efforts,” Thompson said. “Younger people index on cultural topics, and we’ve invested a fair amount in cultural expansions.”  

In line with the age of subscribers, The Atlantic sells itself very well on Facebook, spending something like $50 on ads to acquire a paying subscriber. “It generates a lot of money for us.” 

The magazine has been experimenting with Reddit and LinkedIn ads, with less success.

“I suspect that in the long run, we’ll figure out how to do Reddit and LinkedIn ads price effectively,” he said. “We can reach new people. There’s huge numbers of people who don’t know who we are, what we do.” 

To be a reader of The Atlantic, one has to be curious, with a strong attention span and comfortable with ideas one might disagree with, he said. 

“One of the most distinctive things about us is that we don’t just argue from one position, whether it’s on politics or whether it’s on grammar. We hire very smart people to argue different positions” Thompson said. “You have to be very intellectually curious and comfortable with disagreement. And that’s very different from many other publications which choose an ideological lane and go in that ideological lane.” 

AllSides, a public benefit corporation that gauges media bias, rates the magazine left with a display in “media bias in ways that strongly align with liberal, progressive, or left-wing thought and/or policy agendas. This is our most liberal rating on the political spectrum.”

Ad Fontes Media is also a public benefit corporation that rates news and rates The Atlantic in the Skews Left category of bias. The publication has published more right-leaning perspectives like “I Was a Heretic at The New York Times,” which details the publication in The New York Times of an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that the liberal staff vehemently disagreed with.