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Last April, the business news publisher Quartz stunned the media industry by removing its three-year-old paywall, a move designed to expand its general readership at the potential expense of its paid membership business.
One year later, the pivot serves as a valuable, if limited, case study in the challenges of balancing the dual revenue streams of advertising and subscriptions—a matter of heightened interest following Time’s declaration last week that it too plans to drop its paywall.
For Quartz, however, the experiment has so far produced uninspiring results. And against the backdrop of challenging economic conditions for digital publishers like BuzzFeed Inc. and Vice Media, its future looks increasingly uncertain.
Quartz declined to share how many of the 25,000 paying subscribers it had last April still remain.
But since ungating its content, site readership has dropped from an average of 3 million visitors per month in 2022 to 1.3 million visitors per month between January and March of this year, according to data from the measurement platform Comscore.
According to SimilarWeb, which uses a different methodology to measure site traffic, readership fell from 8.5 million visitors in April 2022 to 4.4 million visitors in April 2023, a 48% drop.
The downward trend fits into a larger pattern of decline: Quartz has lost traffic for the last several years, from 9.6 million monthly visitors in 2019 to 8.1 million in 2020 to 4.9 million in 2021, according to Comscore.
Traffic is the result of a variety of factors, which complicates any direct correlation between paywalls and readership, said Jack Marshall, a media analyst and co-founder of the subscription advisory firm Toolkits.
Outside influences, such as news fatigue, play a role in declining readership, as do shifts in visibility caused by changes to search and social platforms. Quartz, an early pioneer in building audiences through newsletters, has also continued its focus on email in the last year, growing its Daily Brief newsletter to 650,000 free subscribers, up from 575,000 last April, according to the publisher.
