Chris Sutcliffe of The Media Briefing writes about financial news site Quartz and how its international expansion is leading to its growth.
Sutcliffe writes, “So if the potential is there for audiences in the emerging markets to get their news from organisations like Quartz, what advantage does Quartz have over the legacy media outlets that already have editorial teams distributed globally? For Lauf, it comes down to the expertise they have as digital natives:
“I think a vehicle like ours does have a potential advantage there in a couple of ways. We are building for that new reading habit, reading on your phones, reading digitally, reading 24/7. I think because the entire institution is built for that it does give us an advantage.”
“That flexibility and ability to experiment is also something Davies cites as a reason for Quartz’s success. Talking about the introduction of their homepage at a time a debate about destination and landing pages was leaning away from a focus on that central hub (partly as a result of Quartz’s initial design), he said Quartz was still experimenting:
“We’re still learning on that. We’re only two and a half months [since introducing a homepage], so we are still learning about how people are coming to it. It’s consistently one of our most visited pages on a daily basis. The amount of time people spend on it is a little higher than other pages. But we’re still playing with it, to be honest, and that’s the idea. It’s a different service – is it a homepage, is it an addition to the email, is it something different?”
“So is a focus on post-national content the takeaway for publishers looking to emulate Quartz’s success? With the approaching influx of new audiences onto the internet, it would seem to make sense to make sure your overarching editorial outlook is going to offer something for those people.”
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