Monday 29th April: The Atlantic’s Nicholas Thompson on milestones, paywalls, and setting future goals

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In this bonus episode of Media Voices, we hear from Nicholas Thompson, CEO at The Atlantic. We first had Nicholas as a guest on the podcast back in 2019 when he was WIRED’s Editor in Chief, about what he’d learned a year after introducing a paywall to the brand.

Nicholas has since been credited with being a driving force behind The Atlantic’s recent return to profitability and subscriber strategy success. So we were keen to invite him back on for a wide-ranging conversation about how he achieved the turnaround, as well as what happened to their paid newsletter scheme, Apple News+, and his thoughts on wider industry trends like AI.

Nicholas spoke about the experiments The Atlantic has run around its paywall strategy over the past few years, transforming the business holistically, and doing less but in much more depth. He also shares his outlook for the rest of 2024 – including the election effect – and how he’s setting his next goals for the publication after meeting both the 1 million subscriber and profitability milestones earlier this month.

Here’s an interesting case study in how what’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily good for the gander. Earnings reports from some of the biggest platforms and search engines demonstrate that the digital ad ecosystem has rebounded from 2022 — but if you look at the equivalent reports from publishers, there’s not really an equivalent return to form.

The first sentence of this story reads like a neo-noir detective story intro. Well, maybe it is, actually. An AI-generated voice message ‘from’ BBC presenter Liz Bonnin was used to approve the presenters’ likeness in ads for an insect repellant spray. Let’s be honest, this is just the tip of the iceberg for AI-generated frauds and scams. And if you want recommendations for more neo-noir and cyberpunk detective stories, hit me up!

Not to be a party-pooper (all good coverage of podcasts is good for us, after all) but this article in the NYT seems late to the party. Video podcasts haven’t just been around for years, we’ve been celebrating innovations in that space for at least the last few years at the Publisher Podcast Awards, and we’ll be talking about it again at the upcoming Summit. There are good case studies in here, to be fair! It just seems a little… behind the Times 😎

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