Quartz Drops Its Website Paywall in an Unorthodox About-Face

In a move counter to the prevailing trends toward reader revenue in the media industry, the global business publisher Quartz announced Thursday morning that it is removing the paywall from its website to focus more on driving members via its email newsletters. This effectively reverses its May 2019 decision to grant unlimited access to its content only to paying members. Visitors to the site will now be able to read the vast majority of Quartz reporting for free, including bespoke products like its field guides and essentials, though repeated visits will eventually prompt readers to register their email. The membership program itself will continue, with its 25,000 members receiving exclusive access to two Quartz emails, The Forecast and Weekend Brief, which reach a combined audience of 21,000, according to the publisher. Its two geographically oriented products, Quartz Japan and the recently launched Quartz Africa, will remain gated as well. “Our number one priority is to get readers to sign up for the Quartz Daily Brief and start becoming a free but regular reader of Quartz,” said chief executive Zach Seward. “That journey has been the most effective for us in getting people over the line to becoming a member, far more successful than our paywall.” Quartz Unveils 3 New Editorial Products The decision bucks the conventional logic that most publishers use to inform their subscriptions efforts, said Felix Danczak, chief operating officer of subscriptions platform Zephr. Paywalls create touchpoints for readers to encounter calls to subscribe—and eliminating them reduces the number of opportunities for publishers to promote their paid products. But Quartz has built its reputation on innovation and the publisher cites internal data as proof of the business sense of the decision. As the digital subscriptions ecosystem grows more competitive, more publishers will face pressure to reevaluate the goals and methodologies of their subscription strategies. For Quartz, while that might mean fewer net members, that will hopefully lead to higher overall membership revenue. The power of email convinced Quartz to lift its paywall The decision to remove the website paywall stems from a two-fold logic, Seward said. First, in line with its mission to make business better, the publisher has concluded that it can more effectively disseminate vital information by eliminating its paywall, especially as it seeks to grow its international audience. Citing internal data, Quartz has also found that 75% of its members prefer to consume their content via newsletter. In the last quarter of 2021, email became its largest platform for traffic, with email opens surpassing pageviews. The publisher attracted an average of 4.6 million readers to its website in January and February, according to measurement firm Comscore, though those figures are an approximation. The publisher has previously said that its newsletters are its best tools for converting readers into paying members—and its flagship email product, the Quartz Daily Brief, has 575,000 free subscribers. By funneling more readers into its newsletter program, Quartz hopes to expose more visitors to the product that most effectively convinces them to subscribe. Quartz anticipates that the change will lead the raw number of member acquisitions to slow, but in exchange the publisher hopes the members it does net will be more loyal, increasing their customer lifetime value, Seward said. As a result, the publisher believes its rate of revenue will grow at a faster pace. Quartz wades into uncharted territory Industry analysts who spoke with Adweek expressed skepticism about the logic behind the decision. The removal of the paywall decreases the value proposition of the membership, said Rob Ristagno, chief executive of subscriptions consultancy Sterling Woods. Quartz is not reducing the price of its membership, meaning members are effectively paying more for less—and eliminating the paywall undermines the draw of the Quartz archive, Ristagno said. The move could also hamper retention efforts, Danczak added. Churn rates for publishers typically hover between 30%- 40%, and Quartz could find it challenging to convince paying members to re-up their commitment now that the bulk of its reporting is free. Quartz conducts regular surveys of its members—and data from those reports found that supporting the publisher and its mission, rather than the exclusivity of content, is many members’ primary motivation for paying, Seward said. Other publishers with membership programs, as opposed to subscriptions, have seen success in transforming mission-based appeals into revenue. The change from Quartz might test the loyalty of its members, but it will certainly provide rich data for others in the ecosystem eager to see the results of this real-time case study. If the experiment works, it could prompt a wave of experimentation and fundamentally change how publishers think about subscriptions.

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Quartz Drops Its Website Paywall in an Unorthodox About-Face

The majority of its content will now be free to access

Mark Stenberg

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Mark Stenberg