How The Atlantic gets People to Spend More Than 4 Minutes on its Native Ads

The Atlantic took a user-friendly approach when it redesigned its site in April, hoping that, perhaps counterintuitively, giving people less to click on would lead them to spend more time there.

That approach helped boost the audience, but it’s also improved the performance of its native ads, according to the publisher. The click-through rate has tripled, with people spending four to five minutes on native ad posts, the Atlantic said.

But don’t take the Atlantic’s word for it. Ad measurement firm Nudge confirmed that since the redesign, the Atlantic’s native ads are getting shared more on social platforms and that they now outperform BuzzFeed and Mashable in terms of the time readers spend on them.