The Athletic keeps growing .......

Do you have data to back this up? Do features draw more traffic than "three players to watch". I think one of the approaches of letting writers do what they want is that the stories can become self-indulgent and not respond to audience interests.

 

Every article on The Athletic is measured by clicks and by the three-option rating system at the end. If writers aren’t meeting their readers’ interests, they will immediately and will need to come up with a way to do so. It’s an infinitely better system than newspaper guesswork buttressed by anonymous comments from likely non-subscribers.

 

I don’t see any click measures on articles

 

At the end of each story:

What did you think of this story?

MEH

SOLID

AWESOME

 

Where's the TL;DR option? Also, I don't see any way to be negative. "Meh" is mediocre, not "Why did I waste my time on this crap?"

Maybe for The Athletic. But "three players to watch" about high school football would almost certainly get more clicks on my site than an award-winning feature on a swimmer or tennis player or gymnast... or probably anything that isn't football.

 

You don't work there. Or so I've heard.

Editors see all click measures.

 

I’d love to know:
* How many stories are read start to finish
* Of them, how many are rated.
* What the breakdown of ratings is. I’m guessing that if you’re in the middle ( “solid”), you’re not inspired to vote at all.

 

You think the Athletic is the orhanization viewing metric data for stories online? Editors and reporters at my shop, and pretty much every other, I'd imagine, determine what we cover and how we cover it entirely on what our audience spends the most time reading, based on online metrics. We can tell how long they are spending, on average, on a given story, and how far down they page they are scrolling. We can see if readers are engaging in the assets within the story, such as videos and graphics, etc. The Athletic isn't the only organization doing that.

The voting system at the end of articles, by the way, is absurd. A reporter could write a fair, thoroughly researched piece but because a biased reader disagrees with a point that was made, it's going to affect the feedback they offer.

 

Right, but -- at least for now -- The Athletic isn't trying to sell ads. Newspapers got hooked on page views and the other metrics with the idea that data would be helpful in persuading advertisers. I believe The Athletic would rather get a fraction of the page views if they can produce stories that drive more subscriptions.

 

Which I suspect will lead to to tighter editorial control. Overtime the most popular styles will emerge. Will the more opinionated writers over time prove to do better than the more down the middle writers of vice a versa. The writers who like to do technical analysis or those who prefer human interest features. I don't know the answers but as they emerge the paper will develop a more uniform voice.

 

They also have subscribers follow their favorite writers and teams. So they have some idea Person A subcribed to read college football, Astros and Rick Reilly, or whatever.

I imagine once the sample size is big enough to figure out what is really driving subscriptions, the focus and money shifts that way. It's like how Netflix was just making everything under the sun for a while. But now shows are getting cancelled faster. People were watching comedy, so they put money into producing a bunch of standup specials.

I was involved with another sports site startup as a contractor, but it didn't have the level of runway capital The Athletic does. It was a guessing game trying to figure out what drove traffic and the place pivoted multiple times before the money ran out.

That's the advantage The Athletic and Netflix have. They can afford to try everything and then see what works instead of having to guess correctly in the first try or two.

 

If I go to any metro newspaper’s website on a Sunday morning, I guarantee I will find multiple articles that violate this premise. They could be high school stories, or a writeup of the small-college football game that drew 1,000 fans and won’t get 100 clicks, or something from a niche sport that “deserves” coverage regardless of eyeballs. (Virtually all coverage of women’s sports falls under this description.)

The Athletic does none of that housekeeping/paper-of-record coverage.