The Atlantic hired a Facebook news exec to figure out how to get more people to pay for its content - but maybe at a lower price point
- The Atlantic has hired Alex Hardiman, head of news products at Facebook, as chief business and product officer.
- According to president Bob Cohn, Hardiman will help build out tiers to The Atlantic's subscription business through audience research.
- A team of 65 people across The Atlantic's product, engineering and growth teams will report to Hardiman.
The Atlantic is bringing in Alex Hardiman, one of Facebook's key news execs that served as a liaison between publishers and the platform, to beef up its digital innovation plans - specifically when it comes to subscriptions and audience research.
Hardiman joined Facebook two years ago and led various initiatives, including Facebook's push into subscription offerings and The Facebook Journalism Project - which recently announced plans to pump $4.5 million into programs geared at local news publishers.
Before Facebook, she spent nearly a decade working on digital productions and innovation at the New York Times.
According to a Facebook rep, the company is looking for a new head of news products both internally and externally. In the interim, Hardiman's team leads will report to Tom Alison, vp of engineering at Facebook.
In a memo sent to staff on Wednesday, The Atlantic's president Bob Cohn announced the hire. Hardiman will work out of The Atlantic's New York and Washington offices and begin in late October.
The move is part of an aggressive plan for The Atlantic to hire 100 employees in the next year on the heels of Emerson Collective -an organization run by the philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs - acquiring a majority stake in the publication a year ago.
"She'll play a leading role in further developing our reader revenue strategy, and she'll be working closely with Jeff Goldberg and Hayley Romer to build products in support of both edit and sales," Cohn wrote. "It's a broad job, but I think it strips down to this: Alex will lead teams responsible for creating a superior user experience that serves both our audiences and our businesses, and for driving product innovation across the company."
Business Insider talked with Cohn about the hire and how the 160-year old magazine is building up its tech and data expertise within its digital journalism.
Lauren Johnson: What stuck out with Alex to fill this role?
Bob Cohn: We definitely wanted an infusion of Silicon Valley-style innovation and tech expertise in the company. At the same time, we're a media company and not a tech company, so it had to be someone who was grounded in media. Her resume and experience seemed to be ideal before we even met her, which put us over the top.
Johnson: What will she be working on?
Cohn: The product and engineering teams will report to her as well as the growth team. The growth team includes audience development, data science and consumer marketing. It's about 65 people right now and growing.
One of the things she's going to do when she comes in the door is focus on who our audience is and what does our audience want.
Not audience development but audience research. If she's going to be helping us with products that should increase loyalty and help us build towards a consumer business, it starts with knowing what our audience is hungry for. Understanding the audiences and knowing the personas and how to segment our audiences will be an important part of a creating a product strategy. Then figuring out on the consumer side how we build subscription services for those audiences. [She'll] also focus on ensuring that we're offering an excellent user experience.
Johnson: What learnings are you hoping that she brings over from Facebook?
Cohn: At Facebook she was working with dozens and dozens of publishers who were trying to navigate the social media waters and figure out how to succeed and live in a social media world.
So she saw everything and is going to have real good insight into best practices and new ideas. I think her Facebook experience gave her a very wide windshield on what's happening out there. And her New York Times experience means that she comes from a place of irrefutable excellent journalism that was being entrepreneurial and experimental at the same time.
The Atlantic wants to take its subscription business up a notch
Johnson: Within user experience specifically, what is The Atlantic zeroing in on and learning about readers?
Cohn: However a user - a reader, a video-watcher or a podcast listener - interacts with The Atlantic, we want the experience to be excellent. Part of the product job is to make sure that every way we touch the consumer, [the goal is that] it's seamless, it's simple, it's intuitive, it's beautiful.
Johnson: I know your subscription product Masthead has been a big focus over the past year. What's different with those readers and what's working?
Cohn: We obviously have a print magazine that readers pay for but the digital experience at The Atlantic has largely been ad-supported and free to consumers. Masthead is our experiment with premium content on the web and we're learning a lot - part of what the product team will do under Alex is distill best practices there and find a way to bring something - probably at a lower price point - to a wider number of people.
Johnson: Meaning a lower price than Masthead (which is $120 a year)?
Cohn: Yes, a lower price point than Masthead. I imagine that we'll be experimenting with different price points over time and that there will be other options for readers who aren't looking for premium content but regular Atlantic content.
Johnson: So you've seen a need for a medium between the premium subscription model and the ad-supported model?
Cohn: Yeah, I imagine there will be tiers when we finally figure this out. That's something that we're going to be focused on with audience research as well as just building out the infrastructure of a paywall.
Advertising is still a healthy business for The Atlantic, but the publisher is looking to diversify
Johnson: There's been a bigger move for publishers to invest in owned-and-operated properties like websites. How are those visitors differ from people who come from search and social platforms?
Cohn: Mostly we want our content read and to make sure that it has impact. In that way, we're agnostic to whether the consumption happens on our owned-and-operated sites or on third-party platforms. It's been easier to monetize our own platforms and of course we like to give readers an experience that we can control in terms of the look and feel of it.
At the same time, we're very happy to increase our reach by having some of the consumption take place off of our platform.
Johnson: How much are you making from the ad-supported model versus other types of revenue?
Cohn: Digital and print advertising is about half of our revenue. And then we have significant revenue streams in live events, print subscriptions, consulting. It's been really important to us to create a diversified revenue stream.