This about-face in content strategy likely played a role in the dwindling traffic, said Felix Danczak, the senior director of subscriber experience at subscription platform Zuora. Quartz spent years cultivating an audience willing to subscribe to its newsletters and pay for reporting, then reversed course to embrace a free model based on volume.
“If your original strategy focused on newsletters and subscriptions, then you walk that back to emphasize traffic, you have now disincentivized both the traffic audience and the newsletter audience,” Danczak said. “It’s a bit of a scorched earth maneuver.”
Compounding the issue, a site migration over the summer, in which G/O Media moved Quartz to its content management system, Kinja, damaged the search engine authority Quartz had built up through a decade of publishing.
In 2022, traffic dropped from 6.3 million visitors in April to 1.4 million visitors in August, according to Comscore. According to SimilarWeb, traffic dropped from 8.5 million visitors to 3.9 million visitors during the same time period.
Although the resulting frustration has been felt acutely at Quartz, other G/O Media titles have also suffered departures.
In recent weeks, notable exits from across G/O Media include David Ewalt, the editor in chief of Gizmodo, who is leaving to join The Messenger; Vanessa De Luca, the editor in chief of The Root; and Bob Sorokanich, the editor in chief of Jalopnik.
The January hire of veteran editorial director Merrill Brown has inspired a small swell of confidence, as has the recent re-hire of Rory Carroll as the new editor in chief of Jalopnik. But the outlook for Quartz, as well as for the broader G/O Media portfolio, remains uncertain.
“It is a sad place to work,” said one person familiar with the matter. “There is no growth, no innovation and no excitement.”
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