“We both believe very strongly that our 1 million subscribers represent a foundation for excellence and future growth,” editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg and CEO Nicholas Thompson wrote in an email to staff. “However, profitability is fragile in the media industry and we will continue to be highly disciplined in how we operate.”
Cover images of some recent print issues of The Atlantic magazine. Photo: The Atlantic
The Atlantic's revenue grew 10% last year to nearly $100 million, with two-thirds of that coming from subscriptions, according to The Wall Street Journal. In February 2021, less than half of the site's revenue came from subscriptions. The Atlantic's subscription revenue surge is partly due to the paper's aggressive price hike, from $50 to $80 per year (a combined print/digital subscription without ads on the site is $120 per year).
The Atlantic also shifted its editorial strategy to cover bigger issues more deeply (it attracted 36,000 subscribers in the first month of the pandemic in 2020 for its coronavirus coverage). In November 2021, the magazine tested email and Substack newsletters as a perk for paying subscribers.
To read The Atlantic's quality journalism, readers must pay nearly $80 a year for the digital edition or nearly $90 (an additional $30 without ads) for both the digital and print editions. Photo: The Atlantic
The publication also has about 100,000 readers who read the magazine through Apple News+. The success is a turnaround from May 2020, when the company owned by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs laid off 68 employees, mostly in its video and live events division. The Atlantic had 500,000 paying subscribers at the time, according to The New York Times, meaning the company has added half a million subscribers in just under four years.
Editor-in-Chief Goldberg said that The Atlantic is currently experimenting with artificial intelligence and is “building an experimental website and app with AI features, such as games and AI-powered search.”
The Atlantic was founded in 1857 in Boston as The Atlantic Monthly, a literary and cultural magazine. The magazine published commentary by leading writers on education, abolition, and other major political issues of the time.
The Atlantic was a monthly magazine for 144 years until 2001, when they published only 11 issues annually, then reduced to 10 issues starting in 2003. The magazine dropped the word "monthly" from its cover starting in the January & February 2004 issues and officially changed its name to just The Atlantic in 2007.
Hoang Anh (according to The Atlantic, Niemanlab, WSJ)
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