After dropping paywall, Quartz readership declined

Business news site Quartz saw its readership decline after dropping its paywall a year ago, reports Mark Stenberg of Adweek.

Stenberg writes, “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.”

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Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.