Apartment Therapy Unveils Redesign With Sponsored Tools to Encourage Retention

Home design publisher Apartment Therapy unveiled a website redesign earlier this month, featuring new, sponsorable site capabilities and a community forum to foster onsite engagement.

The renovation is part of a larger effort from parent company Apartment Therapy Media, which also owns The Kitchn, Cubby and Dorm Therapy, to encourage reader retention and spur registration, according to president Riva Syrop.

“Some of what we’re doing is in anticipation of what’s happening, and some is a reaction,” Syrop said. “But generally, where traffic comes from is changing, so we need to come to own our audience or completely change our business model.”

Apartment Therapy is the latest in a series of online publishers, including The Verge and Refinery29, to redesign their websites in the hopes of creating a stickier user experience. 

As social platforms and search engines throttle referral traffic to publisher domains, digital media companies have responded by enhancing their homepages in hopes of encouraging readers to linger longer and return more often.

Notably, Apartment Therapy has bucked the trend of declining traffic. According to the publisher, the site is pacing to grow its unique visitors by 8% year over year. However, shifting referral patterns across the industry have prompted the company to act proactively to shore up its existing readership. 

The impending deprecation of third-party cookies and signal loss across the web more broadly have similarly spurred Apartment Therapy to strengthen its pool of first-party data.

New, sponsorable site functions and forum

The new redesign, which began in May and is scheduled to conclude by August, involves two primary updates. 

First, Apartment Therapy introduced three new features: a filterable database of its popular franchise Before & Afters, a searchable bank of house tours and a filterable Image Browsing Hub. Each feature was also sponsored by an endemic brand: Kohl’s, Homes.com and Sherwin-Williams, respectively. 

The three features all serve a pragmatic purpose for readers looking for design inspiration, which it hopes will encourage audiences to treat its website as a tool in addition to a source of inspiration.

In addition to the new features, Apartment Therapy is also in the early stages of launching an onsite forum meant to replicate the community in its popular Apartment Therapist Facebook group. 

The forum will enable users, who must register to access the tool, to communicate with each other to swap decor ideas, advice and inspiration. The concept is currently in beta and will roll out across the site in late July, according to Syrop.

Building registrations without sacrificing scale

The introduction of the onsite forum is one part of a broader effort from Apartment Therapy Media to encourage more readers to register, providing the company with first-party data.

The publisher declined to specify how many registered readers it has, but it has already made strides in this effort through its newsletter offerings across its portfolio.

According to the publisher, The Kitchn’s flagship newsletter, Kitchn Daily, has over 1 million free subscribers, and Apartment Therapy’s marquee email product is near that figure. In total, Apartment Therapy Media has 15 newsletters.

It has also placed certain functions, such as access to The Kitchn’s Recipe Box, behind a registration wall, and it plans to experiment with placing more Apartment Therapy content behind a similar gate.

Apartment Therapy plans to experiment more with registration walls and eventually a narrowly focused paywall in the coming year, according to Syrop. 

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Renovating a revenue plan

While registration walls help primarily to inform ad-targeting, the introduction of a paywall would help Apartment Therapy in its ongoing bid to diversify its revenue.

The company is pacing to bring in $40 million in revenue this year across its portfolio. The largest portion of that is from direct sales (40%), with programmatic (35%), commerce (15%) and distribution and licensing (10%) making up the remainder. 

Moving forward, the publisher plans to place more emphasis on affiliate commerce, using behavioral data to determine which products consumers are interested in as the housing market continues to evolve.

According to Syrop, Apartment Therapy largely avoided the roller-coaster trajectory many companies in the housing and renovation space experienced throughout the pandemic. The company grew revenue by about 75% between 2018 and 2020, then a further 10% in 2021. 

Between 2022 and 2023, the company saw its revenue return to 2020 levels, but this year, Apartment Therapy is pacing for a year-over-year increase of 17%. The company attributes its relative stability to its heightened emphasis on direct sales, as well as its move to branch further into new revenue streams.

“These revenue hits force you to look at your business and see how you can be smarter,” Syrop said. “We recovered by diversifying our revenue streams, reducing our dependencies and becoming obsessive about data.”