Can Atlantic readers signal the next big thing in media?
An audience-centered approach to understanding new technology adoption
At The Atlantic, we are constantly asking ourselves how to innovate, looking into new ways to expand our reach and enhance our business. In the spring of 2022, this search led to a concrete question: After the podcast and newsletter booms, what is the next big thing in media?
We hear about new technologies all the time: virtual reality, web3, synthetic media, artificial intelligence. We can’t know for sure what will come next — or what will stick. We’re not psychics, but we do have our own insight as members of the audience research team at The Atlantic. Because we speak with our readers and listeners all the time, we are uniquely positioned to notice changes in their behavior and interests.
So here’s a proposal for an audience-centered approach to discovering the next big thing in media: Let’s hear our audiences. We can monitor tech and media trends, and most importantly, we can map where readers are in that changing landscape. This deeper understanding can help us make recommendations for product strategy.
In this post, we share the methodology that we follow in this audience-centered approach.
First of all, we track industry news, reports, developments, and announcements. We do this to get a sense of how fast the industry is adopting or testing new technologies or trends.
In practice, this looks like a spreadsheet with a lot of links and one key column: technology. In that category, we include all different types of platforms, formats, or technologies, like AI, VR, audio, or social media:
We monitor this list of news to gauge how frequently we see industry examples for each category over a six-month period.
Next, we talk to our readers. Audience research is a listening process. For this research, we conduct interviews in which we ask readers what platforms they’re using, how and if they are sharing what they read or listen to with others, what they do in their free time, what is the most cutting-edge technology they’re using, and how much they know about all those technologies and trends we’ve collected over six months. Awareness and adoption of these technologies are the two signals we’ll process later in the analysis.
Finally, we integrate these two sources of information. We assign a score to the number of times we see articles on each category or technology. This helps us understand how the industry is reacting to each trend. We use a score of 0, 1, or 2 depending on how low, medium, or high the number of examples and news about each technology is. We also assign a score to the level of awareness or adoption that our audiences show about these technologies.
Here’s an example of this scoring chart:
This scoring chart gives us an average, and we consider that number to assign each technology or trend to the following categories:
Emerging: Technologies with few or no examples in the media industry and low level of awareness and adoption among our readers and listeners.
Rising: Technologies with some experiments in the media industry. Our audience members know about these technologies but haven’t adopted them widely yet.
Established: These are technologies that have multiple working examples and a high level of adoption among Atlantic audiences. In these technologies, we particularly focus on changes in attitudes or behaviors.
Here’s an example of this classification based on the resulting average:
Now, as an audience research team, we don’t do this just for the sake of knowledge. We want to be able to provide our colleagues with actionable insights from our readers and listeners. For that reason, each of these categories comes with a recommendation for product strategy:
- For technologies or platforms that belong to the emerging category, we recommend reading about them and studying them. We should know what is going on and what these technologies are about, even when it doesn’t make sense for The Atlantic to use them or implement them.
- When it comes to rising technologies, we suggest testing or, at least, exploring. Even when we don’t create a prototype, is there a way we can internally analyze what we would be able to do with these?
- Finally, for established technologies, we recommend prototyping. If this is an established technology or platform, if our readers or listeners are already there, then it might make sense for The Atlantic to adopt it too.
We follow this process twice a year. By doing this consistently, we hope to be able to notice any subtle changes in audience behavior and adoption that can tell us, in advance, what the next big thing in media is.
Acknowledgments: Gina Bulla, Kristen House, Ashley Larkin.
Image: Bridgett Blowe
