Harvard Business Review shrank its audience to grow its business
Group Publisher Erika Heilman on HBR Executive, the 40% of subscribers already at VP level, and the AI tool HBR shelved despite good reviews.
For years Harvard Business Review grew by widening the funnel. Sub-brands multiplied: HBR Ascend for younger professionals, the Women at Work podcast, the HBR Presents network. Articles on how to ask for a pay rise drew heavy traffic.
On the first day at the FIPP World Media Congress in Madrid, Erika Heilman, HBR’s Group Publisher, explained why the title is now pointing itself at a far smaller group of readers. The result is HBR Executive, a premium offering for senior leaders launched in May 2025 and now in its second year.
Traffic turned out to be a poor guide to value
Heilman was careful not to disown the wide-funnel era. “This work was not a mistake,” she said. “It helped millions of people and taught us how distinct audiences behave.” The difficulty was that reach and revenue stopped moving together. Early-career advice travelled furthest and reached the readers least able or willing to pay. Conversion was low, and every property needed its own editorial attention, production and upkeep.
“Traffic can tell you something is useful; it cannot tell you whether the audience values it frequently enough to support the cost of creating it.”
She described the error as “mistaking a strong audience signal for a strong business signal” and called it a common one.
Generative AI answers the easy questions now
Then referral traffic from search and social fell, and generative AI accelerated the decline by separating content from its source. Heilman’s example was a manager asking how to give difficult feedback in a performance review. HBR has published plenty on it, and much of its archive has been used to train AI models. A plausible answer now arrives instantly, with no visit required.
Information, good and bad, “is abundant, but judgement remains scarce,” Heilman said. HBR’s job, as she framed it, has moved from supplying generic answers to helping leaders understand which trade-offs apply to them. “Our ambition is to become part of how leaders decide, not merely part of what they read or consume.”
The premium audience was already paying
The data made the choice to go upmarket easier than it might have been. Some 40% of HBR’s subscriber base was already at Vice-President level or above. “This wasn’t a speculative market; it was an existing relationship hiding in plain sight,” she said.
HBR listed the assets rivals would struggle to copy, applying the “right to win” test from strategist Roger Martin’s Playing to Win: editorial trust, a broad contributor network, access to Harvard Business School’s executive education, and relationships with chief HR and learning officers through its parent, Harvard Business Publishing.
Segmentation research by an outside strategy firm produced a specific brief. Senior readers said they wanted:
- Trusted, credible information above everything else.
- Insight tied to action, with less emphasis on volume.
- Curation and personalisation of a vast archive, which HBR had long described internally as “value for time spent”.
- Delivery inside the workflows they already use.
- Peer exchange that offers “real insight and context, not networking for its own sake”.
- AI for speed and efficiency, with humans supplying judgement, nuance and context.
Further research found executives develop through four routes: premium content, executive education, coaching and peer networking.
HBR already owned the first and, through HBS, had access to the second. Coaching is being explored, possibly with AI. Peer networking is where much of the new work has gone.
What HBR built, and what it cut
HBR Executive launched around two needs its editors use as a filter: “enlighten me” (the signals that matter) and “guide me” (application to the reader’s own situation). Peer connection and a way to rehearse difficult conversations are now being added.
HBR also beta-tested Strategy Lab, a proprietary AI strategy tool built with HBS and designed to be demanding and pedagogically sound. Feedback was good. It was dropped anyway: building and maintaining it was expensive, and the features subscribers would have lost to pay for it made the opportunity cost too high.
What subscribers asked for instead was candid, multi-perspective conversations about real challenges, in closed groups where they could speak with psychological safety. HBR now runs case study discussions and communities of practice that put members in a room with HBR Press authors, HBS faculty and magazine contributors. A white-labelled digital community platform is being researched for 2027.
Because senior leaders’ employers budget for learning and development, HBR added group subscriptions for executive teams, companies and membership bodies. Given the headwinds in direct-to-consumer subscriptions, Heilman called it a necessity. “You really can’t just rely on one customer acquisition channel.”
Telling staff what stops is the hard part
HBR’s staff were proud of the reach-era brands. To bring them along, Heilman used a stop-start-continue frame, crediting advice from HBS Professor Frances Frei:
- Continue is the largest category and the one to stress first, because it lowers anxiety. “Most of what you do is going to stay the same.” At HBR that meant editorial rigour, its frameworks and its expert network.
- Start should be limited to two or three new capabilities, so the team is not overwhelmed.
- Stop “is perhaps the hardest one to say”. Heilman found it easier to present as a resourcing and prioritisation decision, with the discontinued work honoured as part of the journey.
She also had to answer the charge that serving fewer people means doing less good. “Focusing on senior leaders does not mean retreating from impact,” she said. Decisions on strategy, technology, jobs and AI taken in the boardroom cascade to employees, customers and partners.
HBR Executive is on track against its goals, according to Heilman, though she gave no subscriber figures. The next chapter, she said, “will be determined by adoption”: whether leaders use what has been built, and whether executives behave the way they told the researchers they would.
John Rahim is Editor of The Media Stack.
