How great content drives revenue ft. The Atlantic CEO, Nick Thompson

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After the interview highlights you can find a shareable quote that you can use to improve your content game. Look out for the “THIS WEEK’S QUOTE” section at the end and share it wherever you like (if you tag us we could have a surprise for you)

If you are looking for tips on how to get ahead of you competition you can find them in our last week’s newsletter ft. VP & Chief Privacy Officer, Public Policy @Meta, Erin Egan! You can find it here.

This week’s will be about The Atlantic CEO, Nicholas Thompson.

Nick Thompson is the CEO at The Atlantic. Prior to The Atlantic, he was the former Editor in Chief of Wired. He is also a contributing editor at CBS, a frequent public speaker about technology, and a co-founder of The Atavist, a digital magazine and publishing platform acquired by WordPress. He was also a senior editor at The New Yorker and author of the book “The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War.”

Parts of this newsletter are freely taken from our interview and adjusted for reading. Everything a person says in the interview reflects the guest's and host’s opinion, not the newsletter's or brand's.

GG: How do you make sure you don't sacrifice what a brand stands for while making great content and a smart money decision?

NT: There are a hundred ways that choice and its trade-offs affect content. There is a trade-off between producing the most number of stories and producing the best stories. You don't want to produce so many that you dilute them or run a risk of reputation damage, but you also don't want to be so pristine that you never publish anything, because you will go out of business. Make sure people have the time they need, but also that people actually do it and publish a lot. One helpful thing is having a business model that supports quality, for example, a subscription-based one.

GG: You're posting on LinkedIn, almost every day, multiple times per day sometimes. When did you start to realize that you have to build a brand online?

NT: I post on social media, I do daily videos, I post on Twitter, I retweet stories, and I have a lot of services I use to try to understand what's trending. It's partly about building a personal brand, but also, as editor-in-chief or CEO, it’s my job to get readers. The old way to get them was publishing a print magazine and get it delivered, but that died a long time ago. Today, if I post on something all the time it’s because I'm trying to understand it and the only way to understand how something works is to use it. To understand how something drives traffic you have to post and see what the rules are, what headlines work and which ones don't. I'm constantly just trying to learn. It never started as building a personal brand, but as a way to drive traffic. Linkedin just popped and for whatever reason my personality or the style of posting works really well on that.

GG: Speaking of the new age of media, if you and I are starting a new publication or a new daily, how would you go about it? Which one comes first: the content or the advertising revenue?

NT: We start with the premise: what are the things that excite us the most. Once we've identified that, we then choose the business model that fits best. For example, if we decide to write only about a delicate subject in America, we won't get much advertising revenue. In that case, we might need to go the foundation route, find a wealthy patron, or charge a high subscription price for people who want to support that kind of journalism. On the other hand, if we decide to focus on inspiring innovators at small businesses, advertising money will come in the door tomorrow, and we won't need to worry about foundation funding or wealthy patrons. If you want to start a vertical focused on social issues, it may not attract a lot of advertisers but it could be great for the brand and drive tons of subscriptions. On the other hand, if you want to focus on innovative small businesses, it may be great for advertisers but not aligned with what the journalists want to do. So there's this constant push and pull of identifying what people are passionate about and then building a business model around it.

GG: As technology continues to evolve, Wired has adapted by launching successful products such as a paywall, a Snapchat channel, and AMP Stories. How do you identify what content would resonate most with your audience? And how do you come up with a tailored plan for monetization?

NT: One of my challenges when I was at Wired and now at The Atlantic is identifying where readers and advertising revenue is going to go. The Atlantic could launch a big video channel with documentary films, and short YouTube videos, we could be super ambitious about podcasts, there are 50 different things that we could do, all of which are appealing. My job is to figure out which three of those will do right, and then prioritize. At Wired, we went through this process. The first thing we did was to launch a paywall, and after that, we launched an affiliate revenue business where we review products and it was phenomenally successful. But when we launched some things like the Snapchat channel, we ended up shutting it down, because the revenue wasn't worth it. Maybe we underestimated Snapchat because we didn't realize it would come back, but for example, YouTube was incredibly interesting. Wired had a YouTube channel, and it's a really hard mix because the stuff that traditional Wired journalists want to do, like a deep investigation of AI, will get 4,000 views, it will be wonderful but it will cost you 50,000 and bring in 300 revenue. So what can you do on YouTube that works well? You can do fun videos where people who are known on YouTube teach you how to juggle, but in line with the Wired brand, because it's "The science of juggling" and "How air resistance works". We ended up coming up with a formula that worked on YouTube. You should always look up to doing a revenue-positive thing in line with the content you are putting out.

THIS WEEK’S QUOTE

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What's the key takeaway from this? Creativity and profitability can go hand in hand. If you want to achieve both, you just need to find something that truly speaks to you, while crafting content that resonates with your audience and potential advertisers. Easy said than done?

• Find out the time to test out new tools and channels to promote your brand. The only way to find out what works and what doesn’t is by using it.

• Create a business model that supports you financially, at the same time, prioritizes the creation of high-quality content.

• Tailor your content to fit the channel where it will be consumed, but don’t forget that your brand is what attracts people in the first place.

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