The site “functioned for too long as just a marketing arm for the print magazine, rather than publication in its own right,” said editor James Bennet. This realization is only starting to dawn on newspaper editors too, who for a long time considered their site to be a mere replica or marketing tool for their print edition.

TheAtlantic.com succeeded in bringing its traffic to 308,000 unique visitors in December, compared to 72,000 in December 2006. The Atlantic is printed 10 times a year with a paid circulation of about 400,000 copies.

“A highly turbulent Web site where people are engaging in argument with each other turns out to work very well with the idea of a polished monthly magazine about the same kind of political and cultural debate,” summed up Bennet.

The Atlantic’s move to a free online model is a relatively rare case in the monthly magazine industry. Most newspapers have by now opted for an entirely free model online, including The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal is considering a similar switch. However, a recent article in the New York Observer underlined the difficulties in making the world’s largest news subscription site (almost one million subscribers) entirely free.

“He said he originally thought making it free would bring in the biggest audience, but that after studying it it’s not as simple as he thought,” said one person present at a Jan. 9 meeting involving owner Rupert Murdoch and the Journal’s bureau chiefs.

Source: paidcontent.org – New York Observer