I write lots of depressing stories about the fate of media companies. Let’s switch it up: Did you hear the one about the publisher who figured out how to find tens of thousands of new, paying subscribers?
That publisher is Wired, Condé Nast’s tech site (and print magazine). And the strategy Wired used to find new subscribers is both super-simple and very hard to pull off: Become a source for news lots of people want, and can’t find anywhere else.
That’s the way Katie Drummond, who took over Wired in 2023, tells it. Drummond says she positioned Wired to specialize in breaking news — and then, when Donald Trump and Elon Musk joined forces after the 2024 election, she had plenty of news to break.
On the one hand, that narrative makes plenty of sense. What Musk and his DOGE team tried to do to the federal bureaucracy was something we’ve never seen before. And Musk’s chainsaw efforts affected millions of American workers and people who depend on those workers. So that’s a big audience.
On the other hand, lots of publications got a boost the first time Donald Trump was in office, for similar reasons. And the conventional wisdom was that it wouldn’t happen again this time — news consumers were burned out on politics, and had already subscribed to everything they were going to subscribe to.
So how did Drummond do it? You can hear my entire conversation with her on my Channels podcast — she’s a great talker and well worth listening to in full. But you can get a sense of her strategy and tactics in this edited excerpt:
Peter Kafka: In February, you guys said you’d added 62,500 subscribers in two weeks. At first I thought that number was a typo — publications just don’t grow that fast. But apparently you really were. What happened?
Katie Drummond: The answer is that our politics coverage — and specifically the coverage we started doing around the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk and his involvement in the Trump administration — drove colossal audiences to Wired. I’ve never seen anything like what we saw in February and March. That was where the subscription boom came from.
Lots of publishers saw interest in Trump spike in 2016, 2017. But lots of wise people said media companies wouldn’t see a “Trump Bump” this time around. Were you surprised to see that level of interest?
We weren’t expecting it. I’ve worked in digital media long enough to just always expect the worst, or just the status quo.
Where the real surprise for me came from was that when we started covering DOGE, we started covering it really hard — like several stories a day, every single day, seven days a week, week after week. And after a week, I looked around, and was like, “where is everyone else? Why aren’t other news organizations covering this?”
I think that us having first-mover advantage on that story meant that for a lot of people, just out there in the world, trying to figure out what was going on, they saw Wired doing this coverage — and they looked at everybody else and sort of felt like, “where is the rest of the media on this?”
A lot of the feedback we got from readers was “thank you so much for doing this coverage that nobody else seems willing to do. I’m now a subscriber.”
Did you feel that some of your new subscribers were doing something similar to people who subscribed to places like the Times in 2017? “You are fighting the good fight. I am signaling with my credit card that I like what you’re doing. And I am against Donald Trump/Elon Musk.”
I think it was people looking for answers and trying to understand what is going on inside of these federal agencies: “This seems really wild and really troubling and really disturbing.”
Of course, we get anti-Trump sentiment in our inboxes. But it was less about anti-Trump and more, “Thank you for giving me information about what is happening inside the government of my own country. I appreciate that.”
On the one hand I can see why you guys would be positioned for this coverage: Elon Musk is a big tech guy; you’re a tech publication. But Wired wasn’t a place I would turn to to learn what’s going on inside government agencies. How did you end up positioned for that?
When I took the job in September 2023, I looked ahead at 2024. There was going to be a very consequential US federal election. There was also a record number of elections being held around the world. Elon Musk was not top of mind for me then. But generative AI was top of mind. Misinformation was top of mind.
Everyone was worried we’d see replays of 2016, 2020, and that the platforms weren’t going to be ready for it.
Exactly. And the potential for more hacking and foreign interference in elections. It felt to me like, “There are so many different intersections with technology and with what we cover — we need to position ourselves now.”
I made a pitch to [Condé Nast] that I needed to build out a politics team. They were very receptive, very supportive.
So by the end of 2023, we had that team in place. We started doing the coverage, and then midway through 2024, our focus changed when Trump was grazed in the ear by a bullet, Elon Musk endorsed him and it very quickly turned into a very different kind of story. One where we were able to bring a lot of expertise to bear around Elon Musk and the tech industry — how they think, how they operate.
And with DOGE… I remember Zoe Schiffer, our director of business coverage — she wrote a book about what happened when Elon Musk bought Twitter. And she said: “This is going to be the Musk playbook — when he goes into a company, this is what he does. I think this is what we’re about to see inside the federal government.”
So we positioned ourselves to cover it through that lens.
Tesla stock is down and Elon Musk is much less visible than he was at the beginning of the year. DOGE doesn’t seem to command the same kind of attention it used to. If people gave you money in February because they cared about DOGE, how do you keep them engaged in May and October?
It’s something that we think about and talk about all the time. The audience numbers on those stories now are not revolutionarily good — but they’re still very good. And our mandate is to continue covering that as long as it is a consequential beat. We’re going to stay on it. There will be more really big stories and really consequential stories to come out of what they are doing inside these agencies.
But in terms of the community that we’ve built and all of those subscribers that we’ve added, now the challenge for us is to introduce them to the rest of Wired and what we have to offer. And to create new opportunities for them to really get to know Wired and get to know our journalists.
So we’re working on all sorts of things. We have been experimenting since late last year with livestream AMAs with Wired journalists, where subscribers can ask them questions. Thousands of people sign up and join those.
This was the idea before the DOGE reporting really took off — to build Wired subscribers into more of a community and create less sort of a transactional back-and-forth.
How is churn? I assume people who were signing up in February are more likely to stop subscribing than someone who’s been with you for a while.
Interestingly, our conversion rates are still way higher than they were last year and the year before. But our churn has gone way, way, way down. Among new subscribers, we’re seeing churn rates that are vastly, vastly lower than what we were seeing in subscribers who signed up a year ago.
Which is interesting. But again, it’s only May. So we need to give that time.
Sounds like you solved the whole thing. You solved publishing.
I wake up every day assuming that I have not. Which I think is a pretty safe way to operate in 2025.
