The Atlantic owes its name and legacy to the 154-year-old monthly magazine founded by
For any magazine publisher to take in the bulk of its advertising revenue from online sources is incredibly rare. Publishing industry executives said they were not aware of any examples of a brand as prominent as the Atlantic doing so.
But for the last few years, The Atlantic has been undergoing a gradual evolution from a magazine publisher to a multimedia company with a collection of successful Web sites that also happens to put out a magazine once a month.
“When I started in ’08, digital was 9 percent of our total ad revenue,” said Jay Lauf, publisher of The Atlantic. “With digital, everybody in the business is always talking about trading print dimes for digital dollars. Well, for the first time we’re actually beating print.” October’s split was 51 percent digital, 49 percent print.
The Atlantic, which expects to make about $18.6 million from advertising this year, or slightly more than half of its total revenue, said the growth in its online share of business was not because of a decline in the
share of print revenue. It sold more ads in the October issue of the magazine than it had in any other issue since David Bradley bought it from
Traffic at TheAtlantic.com and its successful news and aggregation site The Atlantic Wire has grown despite the loss of some popular bloggers like
Over the last five months, Quantcast measured global monthly visitors to
Many magazine executives see their advertising businesses gradually relying more and more on digital revenue even if few of their companies are as far along as The Atlantic. But getting there will most likely take a
lot longer for others than it did for The Atlantic, which is smaller and has lower advertising rates compared with other publications in the so-called thought leader category like
Keeping the brand strong and valuable across all platforms will be what keeps the company growing, said Robin Steinberg, director of publishing