It's been nearly two months since The Atlantic Media Company launched Quartz, a digital-only news publication for business readers, and traffic is growing at a steady clip. The news site pulled in 840,000 unique visitors in October and 860,000 visitors in November, per numbers provided by a Quartz spokesperson via Omniture.
Quartz, like The Economist and the Financial Times, covers global economic news through a macro lens. Its tone, however, is less formal and more conversational than your average business publication -- it's more "webby," you might say. With an editorial staff of 25, its coverage abilities are somewhat limited in scope, and so Quartz opts to go deep on a few key topics, like the fiscal cliff (for which it launched this unusual microsite), rather than skim across many. Perhaps most notably, all of Quartz's content is free, designed to be read and consumed on a multitude of devices and social networks.
It's none too surprising, then, that the makeup of Quartz's referral traffic is markedly different from the business publications it seeks to compete against: Approximately 40% of traffic comes from social networks, 35% from other websites and 11% from search, Editor in Chief Kevin Delaney tells me. The remaining 14% is attributed to direct traffic and Quartz's email newsletter. Its mobile audience is significant: Two in every 10 visitors accesses the site from a smartphone, and one in every 10 arrives via tablet.
The percentage of social media referrals is particularly high. The Economist, by comparison, owes just 15% of incoming traffic to social media, a spokesperson for the magazine tells me. Within social, Delaney says Twitter is Quartz's number one referrer, followed by Digg, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn -- an unusual assortment for a business publication.
Approximately 60% off traffic is domestic. Following the U.S., Canada, the UK, France, Australia and Germany rank highest in readership -- "which is great, because we haven't done a lot of marketing internationally," Delaney observes.
I spoke last week to Delaney about Quartz's traffic patterns over the first two months and his plans for the site going forward. A lightly edited version of our transcript is provided below.
I'm surprised to learn that Twitter and Digg are your two biggest sources of traffic among social networks. Why is that?
Social is at the core of what we're doing, but there's no magical format. We write articles that we believe will be successful in attracting readers, and we share them on the open social web. There's no paywall or app wall, our website is free to access, it's responsively designed, and there's very little friction for people to share articles. We believe pretty strongly in Twitter as a global platform for news media… We encourage our staff to use Twitter, and take a Twitter-friendly approach to headlines. Digg made a transition from a pure voting to a partly editorial curated model, and we've done a bunch of stories that seem to have resonated with them, that they've promoted and that have done well for us.
What do you mean by 'Twitter-friendly' headlines?
Our headlines are non-traditional newspaper headlines. They're a little bit longer, a little bit less formal. We try to hint at the most interesting fact or element of the story in the headline. We frequently workshop our headlines internally, ask for feedback among reporters.
Search traffic is exceptionally low.
Yeah, we weren't even indexed in Google News for the whole month of October. We expect search traffic will rise rise significantly.
What kind of content is performing best?
Certainly our reporting around technology, as well as things we call "factoids," stories that are rooted in data. We did a post for example about how Brazilians have more dogs per capita than anyone else, which we were able to read as an economic indicator. Visual posts -- that is, posts that use charts and graphics -- have done really well. Another type of post we think has done well is the 'authoritative setback,' where we look back at an issue like why U.S. GDP is growing, or how all of a sudden Somali pirates are losing the fight for the sea, and we'll present a sharp analysis of it.
I get the sense your writers aren't chasing breaking news.
We do a mix and it's evolving over time. I think that we're trying to weigh in on the news of the day as much as possible while being selective and smart about what our readers need to know. We're trying to present the macro analysis around it, and as a result it has a different feel from your typical breaking news stories.
How would you describe your readers?
Our readers are interested in business and economic news and analysis globally. Roughly 40% of our traffic comes from outside of the U.S., which is more than most U.S. news sites. According to an audience profile analysis [we conducted internally], close to 75% of our readers are categorized as executives. They're also mobile -- roughly a quarter to a third of our readers are visiting us on mobile devices.
Were you expecting mobile traffic to be so high?
We were betting on mobile and tablets to begin with. It wasn't a hard decision given that we're launching in 2012; that's clearly where usage and growth is happening, especially among global business professionals, [who are] the core users of our site. I guess question was how quickly mobile would become a significant part of our traffic. Eventually we expect it will be the majority.
Do you expect you'll always remain paywall-free?
There's no discussions or plans around a paywall at this point. I'm reluctant to say we'd never do it for part of our content, but for now we're happy with a free, social approach, we're trying to build a big audience globally.
Are you planning to build native apps?
For the moment we'll remain web-only, though we're open to native apps. When it makes sense we'll do it, but right now focused on building out our web app.
What are you focused on for next quarter?
Our developers are working on some improvements to the web app. We'll add some new features, and make some tweaks based on site usage and reader survey data.
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