The homepage increases density – with twice as many stories now appearing at the top of the page – and prominently features The Atlantic’s writers in a new module to showcase their latest reporting.
The changes to TheAtlantic.com reflect The Atlantic’s evolving editorial and business ambitions of the past few years – a time marked by growth of reporting staff and volume of coverage, largely in science, tech, and health and politics and policy – and better meet the needs of a rapidly growing audience. Since the last redesign in April 2015, The Atlantic’s unique monthly audience has grown by 60 percent, hitting a record 33.7 million earlier this year, say the publishers. This week, The Atlantic set new records for single day and concurrent traffic to TheAtlantic.com, driven by its June magazine cover story, My Family’s Slave.
Introducing readers to the new homepage, The Atlantic’s Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg writes: “This new density (miraculously, our designers managed to achieve it without diminishing clarity) goes a long way toward solving a key problem of ours, that of too much great journalism, coming out too fast. This is a caviar problem, to be sure. But figuring out what ought to be featured on the homepage at any given moment has not been an easy thing to do. This new design helps us feature more of our best work at once.”
With the redesign, The Atlantic says it is also defining new standards for what constitutes the best in advertising. The Atlantic has launched a new video ad product, the IMPACT+ HD. Built by The Atlantic’s Ad Product team, the experience is faster-loading and optimized for viewability across platforms, aiming to provide the best reader experience and increased performance for advertisers. Sony BRAVIA OLED TV, the exclusive launch partner for the TheAtlantic.com redesign, welcomes readers to the site with a custom homepage takeover and the new IMPACT+ HD unit.
According to the publishers, here’s what’s new:
* Double number of stories. The redesign doubles the number of stories on the top of the page. The site maintains hierarchy of importance, while giving readers more immediate options.
* Writers module. Because The Atlantic’s greatest assets are its writers, the new design makes their individual profiles and latest work more visible.
* River of news. The Atlantic brought a simple river back to the page to help frequent visitors find the newest reporting and stories they may have missed.
* Flexible curation. The ability for the homepage team to curate the page with our previous redesign gave them immense flexibility when it came to story emphasis and coverage. The redesign retains that feature while also reducing the complexity of the page below the fold.
* Improves ad viewability. This redesign further improves ad positioning on the homepage, moving sponsor content into the first screen and showcasing a high-impact ad higher on the page.
This week, defying a news cycle absorbed by political news, The Atlantic’s June magazine cover story, My Family’s Slave, led to new audience records at TheAtlantic.com. The story broke The Atlantic’s record for concurrent visitors on a single piece, reaching 74,000 concurrents. TheAtlantic.com also set a new single day audience record on May 16, only to be surpassed on May 17: when it reached a record 4.8 million unique monthly visitors, says The Atlantic.
