Can The Atlantic (and Many Other Publishers) Continue to Add Subscribers as Traffic Declines from COVID-19 Peaks PLUS Maxim Launches NFT Marketplace

August 30, 2021

Hello, I'm back after a much needed holiday: a lovely, lazy week at the beaches of the DelMarVa peninsula (international audiences will have to look it up).

Now back to newslettering. A couple of good Digiday pieces including one on how The Atlantic increased its subs by 50% during the pandemic but now is seeind traffic ebb. Most sites are way off their traffic bumps from last year, but people are still searching for COVID information, especially in places where Delta is driving case numbers again.

Digiday also also has a piece digging into the numbes of the ad market recovery and what areas of digital are driving that boune back.

Other than that, we have a story about Maxim launchnig an NFT market, not just selling their own work but creating a marketplace where creators, artists and musicians can sell their work as well.

Some interesting market research out of Oz that says that 55- to 64-year-olds are a new valuable demographic. How to make your digital output more accessible anad a New York Times piece on Politico's billion dollar sale to German publishing powerhouse Axel Springer.

The Atlantic added about 280,000 subscribers from the first half of 2020 to the first half of 2021, but traffic has dipped significantly since last year.

Subscribers are up by 50%, but traffic has dropped after the pandemic - as it has for most sites. Can The Atlantic keep subscriber growth rolling along as the top of the funnel narrows?

Some U.S.-based media have gotten their mojo back in the H1 2021, returning to ad spend growth levels that exceeded the same period in 2019.

 “Within digital, there’s an elevation of growth we suspect is because of digital endemics that have access to cheap capital and are spending a lot on marketing and advertising.” said Brian Wieser, GroupM’s global president of business intelligence.

Maxim, the NY-based international mens’ media brand, will launch its own NFT marketplace in partnership with blockchain R&D Lab, xSigma. NFT’s, short for non-fungible tokens, are pieces of digital multimedia art (drawings, animated GIFS, songs, even tweets) that are recorded on the blockchain as a way of keeping track of who owns them. An NFT …

When Fortune raised $1.3m by selling 256 NFTs of its latest cover art, it is bound to raise interest by other publishers. But Maxim is doing something different. They are looking to set up a marketplace selling not only their IP but that of creators, artists and musicians.

Read to the end for a video of two AIs talking to each other that basically sounds like every conversation on Clubhouse

Highlighting how SPACs - special purpose acquisition companies - are bundling up companies and content in such a way that they are aggregating audiences with lots of redundant content.

Two weeks ago Nine and Kantar released ‘Blindspot’, a timely piece of research which identified Australians aged 55–64 as a new power group of highly valuable ‘Super Consumers’. It found that this power posse is not only the fastest growing age cohort in the last two decades, they also have the largest share of household […]

Interesting piece of research in Australia listing folks aged 55-64 as a new 'power group' of consumers.

We go behind the scenes of our recent project on what it looks like to reconnect Black communities torn apart by highways.

Calling out data journalists, here is a good run down on how Bloomberg created maps looking at how US highways isolated and cut through black neighbourhoods.

By considering the ways people navigate the digital world differently, news organizations connect with their audiences in a more compassionate way.

Industry News

From “son of” to mogul in his own right: Robert Allbritton just became the unlikeliest winner of the new media sweepstakes.