The Athletic Grows Revenue 33% to $54M While Others Chase Clicks

The Athletic reported $54 million in Q2 2025 revenue, up one-third year over year, with advertising revenue nearly doubling to $14.1 million. The New York Times-owned sports publisher also posted an adjusted operating profit of $5.8 million. Those numbers make it, alongside its parent company, publishing's most profitable case study — and one of its homepage tactics deserves scrutiny.

What does The Athletic actually do?

The publisher displays comment counts on selected articles on its homepage. That is the entire mechanism. No algorithmic change, no new platform, no paid distribution. Readers see which stories generated 500 comments and which generated one.

The technique is social proof, applied to owned surfaces. People click on what other people already clicked on. An article with a large comment count signals a conversation worth joining. A count of one signals the opposite.

The context matters. Referral traffic from search and social platforms keeps falling. Publishers cannot control that decline. They can control their homepages, and The Athletic treats its homepage inventory as a conversion surface rather than a passive index of the day's output.

Why does this work when traffic is shrinking?

The source makes a direct argument: publishers must make more of the audiences they already have. Comment counts are one of the cheapest ways to do that. A displayed count of 500 next to a displayed count of one shifts clicks toward the story with demonstrated demand, all else being equal.

There are caveats the source itself acknowledges. Comment counts are a blunt signal. Not every strong article generates hundreds of comments. Some pieces earn wide sharing instead. Others show unusually high engagement relative to modest traffic. Comment volume alone, taken without benchmarks, can mislead.

Takeaway: the tactic converts existing attention into more clicks, but only for publishers with a meaningful direct audience in the first place.

Which engagement signals go beyond comments?

The source recommends a broader measurement program:

• Start with comments. Display counts on selected homepage articles and test whether click-through rate improves.
• Expand signals. Add shares, likes and other indicators, then establish which ones drive valuable repeat behavior rather than one-off clicks.
• Identify over-performers. Compare each article's engagement against relevant benchmarks instead of promoting whatever has the most raw traffic.
• Improve prominence. Test whether featuring over-performing articles more prominently raises engagement across homepages, section fronts and topic pages.

The source also suggests statistical modeling, potentially supported by AI, to flag articles over-performing against expected engagement levels — a Bayesian-style approach. This combines editorial judgment with measured audience behavior instead of replacing one with the other.

Most publishers already run composite engagement scores, the source notes. They de-prioritize raw traffic in favor of session duration, clicks, scroll depth and comments, on the theory that these metrics build genuinely engaged audiences. That claim is widespread in the industry. The source presents it as common practice, not as a tested finding, and offers no data on outcomes.

Takeaway: comments are the entry point; a benchmarked mix of signals is the durable method.

What are the risks?

Click-through rate is not a perfect success metric. The source is blunt about this: the most clickable content often drifts toward rage-bait and clickbait, which is exactly the content publishers should avoid. Optimizing homepage placement purely for CTR could amplify that drift. No measurement of brand damage or reader trust appears in the source, and that gap deserves attention before anyone copies the tactic wholesale.

The financials, by contrast, are confirmed figures. The engagement recommendations are the author's argument, supported by reasoning rather than published experiments. Readers should keep those two categories separate.

What should publishers watch next?

Test the comment-count display against a control and measure click-through rate before scaling it. Watch whether over-performer promotion raises session duration and repeat visits, not just clicks. And monitor the wider referral environment: the source points to ongoing coverage of Google's AI Overview traffic changes and Condé Nast's guidance to plan as if search traffic will reach zero.