The Partnership Puzzle

Bob Cohn Jul 16 2012, 2:48 PM ET

Is it really a good idea for publishers to give away their content for free?

It's an article of faith among digital publishers that content partnerships are one of the key levers for success. If you're operating a small site and you want to grow, you need to partner up with big distributors that can serve as megaphones, amplifying your content and, the theory goes, bringing a new audience back to you. If you're running a big site, you need partners to provide fresh content, and lots of it, to satisfy the millions of eyeballs arriving each day.

And so we live in a partnership ecosystem. As a medium-sized player, we at The Atlantic have partnerships going in both directions. We send some of our best stories to sites that have huge traffic. We take smart stories from smaller sites that are happy to share their goods with our strong brand and relatively large audience.

All of these partnerships raise the obvious question: Is it really a good idea for publishers to give away their content for free? The arguments cut both ways.

The chief argument in favor of sharing content is that you can get direct traffic in return. If the partner site is displaying your logo and linking to other stories on your site, it's a fine idea to give away a story or two in return. This is a plausible theory that bears out on occasion. If, for example, Yahoo! runs a story from The Atlantic or one of our sister sites, especially on its home page, there can be a surge of traffic from Yahoo! back to our pages. Not always, and often the surge is more like a trickle, but it can be something.

But what if The Atlantic's partner has a particularly strong presence in social media? If it rips an Atlantic article and then uses its social infrastructure to push that piece to the world, the inbound traffic from Facebook or Twitter goes to the partner site, not to us. (This assumes that the partner is linking to our article on its site, not our article on our site.)

We don't worry much that when Yahoo! posts our story, they're grabbing readers who would otherwise have read that piece on TheAtlantic.com. Those might be separate audiences. But if our partner was dominating Facebook, Twitter and Reddit with links back to our story on its site, our own social efforts might be drowned out. With social media now generating the plurality of our unique visitors, this could hurt.

Now let's consider branding. This, some say, ought to be the tiebreaker. If you accept that there are gains to be made from direct links but losses to be suffered in social media (and maybe don't be too quick to accept either of those theories), then the branding benefit could be persuasive. The theory, of course, is that just having your logo on another site, even if there are no clicks back, is good exposure for your brand. Certainly there's logic in that: A highway road sign provides branding, even if customers are cruising past at 60 mph. Maybe you'll stop at that pancake house not now, but in the next state over.

OK, but there's a case to be made that people have been trained to tune out the noise when they're on websites--to avoid the blinking ads and the right-rail modules and the partner logos. If they're reading defensively, if they're tuning out the noise, then you're not getting exposure after all. And, if you were happily trading exposure for some losses in social media, well, maybe that trade isn't worth it anymore.

I still believe in content partnerships. But we should be honest about the possible tradeoffs, and humble in our certainty about how exactly these arrangements work.

This post also appears at Folio, where Cohn writes a bimonthly column.

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Bob Cohn is the editor of Atlantic Digital. He oversees editorial affairs for TheAtlantic.com, The Atlantic Wire, The Atlantic Cities, and The Atlantic's mobile platforms. He has worked as executive editor at Wired and The Industry Standard and as a writer at Newsweek. More

Bob Cohn is editor of Atlantic Digital. In this role, he oversees all editorial components of The Atlantic’s digital and mobile properties, including TheAtlantic.com, The Atlantic Wire, and The Atlantic Cities, as well as the presentation of the print publication’s content on digital platforms.

Prior to joining The Atlantic in January 2009, Cohn was for eight years executive editor of Wired, where he helped the magazine find a mainstream following and earn a national reputation. He oversaw all editorial aspects of the magazine, helping to supervise a staff of 40 journalists and dozens of freelancers. Under his leadership, Wired was nominated seven times for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence and won the honor three times.

For nearly two years during the dot-com boom, Cohn was executive editor at The Industry Standard, a newsweekly covering the Internet economy. He directed a staff of writers and editors, planned and edited cover stories, and was in charge of editorial special projects, including the company’s extensions into television, radio, international publishing, and new domestic magazines. During the late 1990s, he worked four years as editor and, later, publisher of Stanford magazine, and as editorial director of the Stanford Alumni Association, overseeing the bimonthly magazine, the online department, electronic newsletters, and other communications programs.

Cohn began his journalism career at Newsweek, where he worked in the Washington bureau for 10 years. He served as the magazine’s legal affairs correspondent, with responsibility for the Supreme Court, the Justice Department, and the FBI, and later was named the magazine’s White House correspondent. He covered the presidency of Bill Clinton from 1993 to early 1996.

Since his arrival in 2009, Atlantic Digital has received numerous journalistic honors. For the past three consecutive years, The Atlantic has been named a National Magazine Award finalist for “General Excellence, Digital,” among other categories. The Atlantic was also named a finalist for Magazine of the Year (print and web combined) in 2010 and 2011. In 2011, TheAtlantic.com received Min Online’s “Best of the Web” award for “Editorial Excellence “ Overall” and in 2012, Cohn and colleagues were recognized as Min’s “Digital Team of the Year.” Following Cohn’s first year at The Atlantic, TheAtlantic.com received a Webby Award for Best Magazine, and in the months after the launch of Atlantic Cities, the site received Ad Age’s Media Vanguard Award for Best Web Vertical Launch.

Individually, Cohn has been recognized for his accomplishments at The Atlantic. In 2012, he was inducted into Min’s Digital Hall of Fame in 2012, and in 2010 he was named one of Washington, D.C.’s 50 Most Powerful People by GQ.

Cohn’s work has been recognized with a variety of other national awards for editing and writing. During his tenure at Wired, the magazine was nominated for 11 National Magazine Awards and won six, including the three citations for General Excellence. At Newsweek, where he shared in more than a dozen awards, he was honored with the American Bar Association’s prestigious Silver Gavel Award for coverage of the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation process. At Stanford magazine, a story he wrote on the university’s affirmative action policies was named best article of the year in college magazines. The next year, Stanford was named the best university publication in the country by Folio magazine.

Cohn graduated from Stanford with high honors and later earned a master's degree in the Study of Law from Yale Law School as a Ford Foundation Fellow. A native of Chicago, he lives with his wife and two daughters outside Washington, D.C.