{"id":449,"date":"2015-09-13T18:56:08","date_gmt":"2015-09-13T22:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/politico-a-sharp-focus-on-a-digital-audience\/"},"modified":"2015-09-13T21:13:44","modified_gmt":"2015-09-14T01:13:44","slug":"politico-a-sharp-focus-on-digital-audience","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/politico-a-sharp-focus-on-digital-audience\/","title":{"rendered":"Politico: A sharp focus on digital audience"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"POLITICO_Logo\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Few industries have been disrupted more brutally in the last ten years than\u00a0the news industry. More people are reading and sharing news stories than ever before, but few of\u00a0the\u00a0companies\u00a0that create those\u00a0news stories are in a position\u00a0to capture the\u00a0value they create.<\/p>\n

The Internet destroyed\u00a0geographic barriers that had given\u00a0local news companies\u00a0easy monopolies and kept national news companies from achieving easy scale. What’s worse, platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and search services like Google, wrested control of news distribution from companies that never had to share it. News sites are making lunch, and these\u00a0digital behemoths are eating it.<\/p>\n

Any news\u00a0company\u00a0that’s managed to thrive in such uncertain times\u00a0could be considered a digital winner. Especially one that\u00a0was born into them.<\/p>\n

Politico is one such company.<\/p>\n

Politico was founded by two former Washington Post reporters in 2007 to cover the 2008 election — with the financial support of Allbritton Communications — and quickly made its presence felt\u00a0in a\u00a0political news scene dominated by slow-moving legacy media hampered by the demands and conventions of print.<\/p>\n

Politico’s focus and pace, as well as\u00a0what some would call its knack\u00a0for political drama,\u00a0met the demands of a hungry digital audience when others did not. When\u00a0most news home pages\u00a0mixed political articles in among a busy mix of other topics, Politico covered\u00a0politics exclusively. When other news sites published\u00a0long articles with straightforward headlines, Politico reporters\u00a0blogged fresh content in bite-size chunks that caught the fast-moving eyes of digital readers. While other media companies desperately laid off staff and worked\u00a0to rile up free content, Politico hired strong reporters with years of experience, and in many cases, strong\u00a0presences\u00a0on social media.<\/p>\n

The result? While\u00a0other news companies\u00a0struggled to hold onto\u00a0the value they captured\u00a0in the pre-digital era, Politico mined its hard-won audience of influential “politicos” to capture value in ways that went far beyond the harsh, dollars-to-dimes business of online display advertising. In October 2008, it was ranked as the ninth most read newspaper website in the country. In 2010,\u00a0it reached profitability and net profitability<\/a>. In subsequent years, its command of its digital audience’s attention helped the small operation grow into a formidable news brand<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today, Politico’s\u00a0300-member staff runs an agenda-setting website, which gets more than 7 million unique visitors and 50 million page views a month. “Politico writers and editors are masters of knowing what will make prime time,” Gabriel Sherman wrote in The New Republic in 2009<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are always first with stories, and they\u2019ve redefined the way I do my job and the way the internet-based journalists work,\u201d CBSNews.com political reporter Brian Montopoli told The Wrap<\/a> in 2011. Most\u00a0of Politico’s\u00a0revenue had come from its small-circulation print newspaper until that year, when revenue from print ads and online ads reached an even split<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But Politico runs more than the news site that helped it lead the political conversation. It also runs the POLITICO print newspaper, which distributes 35,000 copies in the high-demand Washington D.C. area; POLITICO Magazine, an online and print publication that features long-form stories on issues in the political landscape; and a\u00a0recently launched European edition fueled by bureaus in London, Berlin and Paris. In addition, it\u00a0manages its own line of mobile news apps and sells tickets to its monthly events, where Politico\u00a0staffers interview top newsmakers like Nancy Pelosi, Marco Rubio and Bob Woodward.<\/p>\n

Politico’s most lucrative product, though, the one that shows how successfully it’s captured value from its niche audience,\u00a0is its thousands-of-dollars-a-year subscription policy news service, POLITICO Pro. Launched in 2011, it\u00a0supplies insiders with scarce policy news in a host of verticals, including health care and agriculture, that have been expanding ever since.<\/p>\n

“The idea with Pro is to go niche inside of a niche, to take slices of what we do and try to create a little politics for people who care just about energy or just technology and charge a large premium,” founder Jim VandeHei said the year of its launch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Notably, Politico is\u00a0also an early seller\u00a0of native advertisements, a lucrative type\u00a0of online ad in which advertisers’ messages appear not as sidebars or banners but as content. These\u00a0ads, though controversial among traditional news organizations because of how much sponsored messages\u00a0can look like news stories, make more sense in an increasingly mobile digital space of small screens and busy spaces.<\/p>\n

Politico recently started a New York venture, and in April, announced plans to expand to more U.S. state capitals in New Jersey and Florida. With another\u00a0presidential election around the corner, Politico should have another rare successful year in the news industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few industries have been disrupted more brutally in the last ten years than\u00a0the news industry. More people are reading and sharing news stories than ever before, but few of\u00a0the\u00a0companies\u00a0that create those\u00a0news stories are in a position\u00a0to capture the\u00a0value they create. 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