Why Quartz is learning to love the homepage
Quartz only introduced a homepage in 2014, and a pared-down one at that. Modeled on its Daily Brief email newsletter, its homepage consists of an updated stream of stories.
But with Quartz’s 60-strong global editorial team pushing out 50 to 60 pieces a day, the 3-year-old site wants to make more of its content visible, with more links and ways for readers to move around the site, according to Jamie Labate, Quartz’s digital director across EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). Traffic to Quartz’s homepage has remained steady, at 10 per cent of traffic, and the idea behind the refresh is to boost return visits and loyalty with those readers, he said.
“We’ll maintain the style you expect with Quartz,” he told Digiday. “We’re keeping it visual and simple. The content will be front and center, and the continuous scroll will still be there.”
Quartz’s increased content has come in part thanks to its global expansion. About half of Quartz’s 15m global monthly unique visitors come from outside of the US. The publisher launched in India in March 2014 and now gets about 500,000 monthly uniques from that country (comScore). Quartz Africa followed this summer and plans to grow its readership there to 1m monthly uniques within a year.
More like this
Quartz releases site update, focuses on ‘continuous design’
From The New York Times to Quartz, which publisher is king of the visual web?
Quartz editor-in-chief on engaging advertising, videos and charts