Quartz and media trends - Beware simple answers

It wasn’t long ago that people were praising Quartz as magical. Media experts were pointing to Quartz as a model strategy that other publishers ought to consider.

Well, times have changed.

Quartz recently removed its three-year-old paywall, according to an article distributed by Bo Sack. The move is designed to expand its general readership, but of course that’s at the expense of its paid membership business.

Generally speaking, as you know, publishers try to manipulate the lever between subscription revenue and ad revenue. If they emphasize the subscription side, they tend towards paywalls.

A lot of people will look at the Quartz example and say, “See, paywalls don’t work!”

To buttress their case, they might cite the example of Time magazine, which also plans to drop its paywall.

It’s not that simple, folks. You have to look into the details.

The Quartz example isn’t all that great for advocates of removing paywalls, because even after ungating their content, readership has dropped from 3 million per month to 1.3 million per month.

There are a lot of complicating factors here, such as a merger with G/O Media, which raises some question of cultural fit, and all that fun stuff. Some of the cultural friction led some leading Quartz reporters to leave.

So this is not simply a question of paywalls vs. no paywalls.

Quoting from the article …

"This about-face in content strategy likely played a role in the dwindling traffic, said Felix Danczak, the senior director of subscriber experience at subscription platform Zuora. Quartz spent years cultivating an audience willing to subscribe to its newsletters and pay for reporting, then reversed course to embrace a free model based on volume."

The bottom line is that all kinds of things were going on at Quartz, and you can’t pin this on paywall vs. no paywall.

References
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One Year After Removing Its Paywall, Quartz’s Traffic Continues to Drop
https://www.adweek.com/media/quartz-paywall-traffic/

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