Designed for mobile devices rather than passé desktops, and built with HTML5 technology rather than old-fashioned apps, four-week-old business read Quartz is about as modern as a magazine can get.

The business model for Quartz – conceived and launched as a start-up by US publisher the Atlantic Media Company – has a distinctly contemporary feel to it too, seeking to attract three million readers within 12 months and double that in year two, with barely a dollar spent on advertising.

“We are going to do this in, what I would argue, is the new way,” says Justin Smith, president of Atlantic Media.

“We are not going to buy billboards in Hong Kong and print ads in regional magazines,” Smith adds. “We are going to do this largely through original and compelling content distributed via the free open web, particularly through social sharing of content.

“That’s how we intend to find our readership and our audience.”

Youthful challenger

Quartz is not like older rivals such as Financial Times (founded in 1888) and The Economist (founded in 1843), Smith contends, highlighting the digital-only title’s pursuit of fresh approaches to journalism, advertising and distribution in an interview with Media Business Asia.

As social networks replace search engines as the main way people find news stories online, incumbent titles seeking to tap subscription revenues through paywalls could find themselves on the back foot, Smith argues.

By contrast, Quartz will inject itself fully into this new ecosystem of digital content.  “In its simplest form,” Smith continues, “that’s the greatest opportunity we see.”

Moreover, there exists a sizable untapped audience that a magazine like Quartz can tap into, Smith proposes, with 2009’s global financial crisis serving as a significant watershed in how interconnected the world has become, while underscoring the importance of non-Western markets to the global economy.

Quartz’s target audience comprises global business professionals, via an English-language service at first, with around half the targeted audience outside the US. Additional languages will come on stream as the title builds scale.

Digital pedigree

The rhetoric may sound lofty, but Smith feels Quartz has two aces up its sleeve. One is the beginnings of a promisingly solid roster of journalists, which will be critical to success.

Kevin Delaney, former managing editor of WSJ.com, has been installed as editor-in-chief while Gordon Lichfield, ex -deputy digital editor and media editor at The Economist, has become global news editor.

Atlantic Media also has a history of digital success, Smith adds, having boosted the online audience for its venerable flagship The Atlantic from 500,000 to 17 million uniques without any outlay on advertising, after knocking down the paywall four years ago.

Digital CPMs aren’t too shabby either, at around half the print rate for The Atlantic, reflecting the value of a niche high-end audience online. From almost 100% in 2008, print now brings in only around 30% of The Atlantic’s revenues, Smith adds.

Quartz is in some ways the product of lessons and learnings picked up along The Atlantic’s digital journey, with a lighter business model unencumbered by traditional printing and distribution costs. Nimble media start-ups, able to respond more quickly to changes in the marketplace, have the advantage over the incumbents in the US for the first time, Smith suggests.

“You create a cost structure that’s so much lower than traditional media that you don’t require the same scale of revenue to be profitable,” he says.

“In particular, that’s what allows you to forego subscription revenue and go right after the audience. It’s an emerging model that we think the global business market hasn’t seen yet, and we’re trying to bring it to them.”

Quartz also embodies the latest trends in online advertising. Rather than banner ads placed adjacent to editorial content, sponsored content will be slotted in-between content, with an in-house team on hand to customize brand materials for Quartz’s user interface.

“It’s non-standard advertising,” Smith explains. “We create it. We don’t do this through an ad server, we don’t do this through an Internet Advertising Bureau standard. It’s a Quartz-specific advertising unit that we build for advertisers based on their creative assets.”

As with other publishers, Quartz has also set up an events team to broaden its commercial options. The site launched with four anchor sponsors, Boeing, Cadillac, Chevron and Credit Suisse, before opening up to other advertisers next year.

Breakeven for the new venture is targeted within three years, on an initial investment somewhere between US$5-10 million.

Pragmatic approach

Despite Quartz's a-la-mode embrace of the latest trends in digital publishing, from responsive design to in-stream advertising, the owners aren’t wedded to any particular ideology of online publishing.

Rather than a philosophy, free for example is seen as an effective way to quickly get scale.

“Once we have that, absolutely we will be looking at introducing paid content verticals and paid content models, that will drill deeper into specific segments of our audience,” Smith says.

In a break from traditional publishing, Quartz’s journalists have been assigned trends to cover rather than sectors, with an emphasis on publishing first and amending stories on the fly.

Overall, Smith wants to see 100 pieces of original and aggregated content published every day, from news snippets to infographics to long-form features, provided by in-house writers as well as third-party content partners such as CNBC.

Daily output per scribe ought to be three to six times that of writers working for the FT and Economist. The tone meanwhile, in keeping with the times, should be slightly irreverent.

As with Quartz’s main rivals however, characterized as more serious and high-minded by Smith, success will hinge on the quality of the reporting and the relevance of the content.

“We are looking to stand out on the web and to be entertaining and to be provocative,” Smith says, “but all the while be very high quality and utilitarian for a business person.”