When the world pronounced the death of print magazines, Monocle started a print magazine. As social media peaked in popularity, founder Tyler Brûlé declared he did not care for it. Several years after they’d started, Monocle was valuated at $115 million. These types of occurrences are not unusual. Monocle has consistently been equal parts counterintuition and case study. It’s this combination that provokes my curiosity. I went to visit their headquarters at Midori House to chat with their founding editor, Andrew Tuck.
Monocle started as a print magazine in 2007. The magazine was originally inspired by the best of German magazines such as Stern, smaller business titles like Switzerland’s BILANZ, Italian newspaper IL Sole’s IL magazine, and issues of Vogue magazine from the 70s.
“We looked at a lot of things, and we also tried to tap into the early excitement of magazines when we first looked at them in our twenties,” said founding editor Andrew Tuck. Tuck mentions The Face, and i-D. “They’re certainly not what we deliver on page, but what was it about them that made them exciting?
“In a way, it was their independence. They weren’t part of big conglomerates. They were able to do things in a more interesting way.”
Monocle magazine’s subject matter covers a wide range. “If you crack open The New York Times, you’re not surprised to read a market report as well as read a runway show report.
“That breadth of topics is what we’ve tried to do in Monocle. Was there a proper predecessor? Not really. Maybe as I said, some of the German titles. But we felt that it wasn’t a revolution, what we were doing at all. You got Monocle, or you went out and you bought Architectural Digest, The Economist, The New York Times, the Financial Times, How to Spend It, and you would end up with a huge pile of magazines to get the same flavor you got in one title with Monocle.”
Despite the vision being extremely concrete, the magazine was started without any market research. “If we had gone out and asked people what needed to be done, and if we’d researched very carefully and if we’d been listening to the market, I think we’d have made the wrong decisions,” said Tuck.
Nor does Monocle look to its peers’ and competitors’ activities for guidance. Tuck said, “We don’t then go and ask other people, we don’t look over our shoulder. There’s a sense of not wanting to be in anyone else’s slipstream.”
“From the beginning — actually, especially in the beginning — we didn’t do a lot of things because we didn’t want to be like other people. We needed to make some territory ourselves, and we needed to find a way of telling stories that was distinct and ours.”
Monocle’s team is also guided by a creative constraint: their independence. “In the end, there’s a simple factor. We’re not owned by a giant corporation. We have to make money at the end of every single month,” said Tuck.
“We have to show profit, because we have 120 people to pay. That has made us cautious, and sometimes wisely slow, about big projects.”
“That’s why we didn’t spend money on a social media team. In the end, we couldn’t see how to monetize that, whereas when we looked at the possibility of looking into podcasts and radio, we could see quite clearly how to do that.”
Monocle launched a podcast in 2008, which has since evolved into a 24-hour radio service. Undoubtedly, Monocle’s curiosity in monetization was also a reason for its expansion into brick and mortar stores, which made up approximately 15 percent of their business in 2014, and cafes. They also publish books, the most recent of which is The Monocle Guide to Good Business.
“To more succinctly answer your question, there’s the balance between not thought out, but deeply felt, gut instinct, knowing it’s right for brand,” he said. “And then on the other side, matching that with some conservative thought about how we use our money and use it wisely.”
I thought about money and how Monocle made its money very differently from the rest of the media world’s. Many media companies today focus on pageviews, volume, and sensationalism, but Monocle’s core business focuses on high quality service journalism for 10 print issues per year. Tuck attributes this to the fact that Monocle prioritizes not only their scale or numbers, but loyalty.
“We have many subscribers that have been with us for ten years,” he said. “We like to look after people, and they are loyal to us. That’s the difference between us and a purely Internet news service where people are judging the number of hits they get in millions and millions. Every day, they’re only as good as the last crazy headline they wrote. We have never sold ourselves just on pure numbers. We have always sold ourselves on who our audience is.”
Although Monocle’s website regularly goes viral, Tuck’s view is that the inflated pageview numbers don’t mean much. “They’re all one night stands. They all come for a quick one and then they’re gone. That’s no relationship for me as a brand, and that’s no use to our advertisers or the people we work with,” he said.
Tuck would much prefer to grow gradually and retain as many new readers as possible. They’re much more valuable in the long run because, “those are people who have come, looked at the brand, looked at our reporting, looked at our kind of storytelling, and thought, ‘This is good for me, I’d like to have a relationship with you, I’d like to start a relationship with you, and I’m going to stick around. When you wake up in the morning, I’ll still be there.’
“Those people are much more interesting to me rather than the fleeting numbers that you get by posting cat videos or ten celebrities naked that you never thought you’d see in the bath. We’re never going to go there. We’re not just purely chasing numbers, we’re chasing integrity. We’re chasing brand building. If that’s a different game, then it’s fine. Our advertisers understand it and our readers understand it.”
Tuck’s prioritization of loyalty is reminiscent of Farnam Street founder Shane Parrish’s thoughts on media companies chasing pageviews. Parrish said, “They’re not building any sustainable relationships with people. [The relationship] becomes transitory and transactional, instead of based on reciprocation, value, and trust.”
There are many ways to build media companies. Business models don’t have to be built on the sandy foundation of virality. Companies can be built independently. Monocle’s counterintuitive decisions are driven not by contrarianism, but critical thinking. This deep level of consideration is particularly rare in an age when entrepreneurs and companies chase the glittering lure of technology. Walking the tightrope between commerce and creativity isn’t an easy task, but Monocle uses on their commercial constraints to guide their creative muscle.
Herbert Lui writes a newsletter that explores media, information, and marketing. His work has appeared in TIME, The Huffington Post, and Lifehacker.