Parents Spend Anything to Make Their Kids Happy: Apartment Therapy’s New Bet Is Counting on It

E-commerce makes up about 15% of revenue at Apartment Therapy Media—but at Cubby, its site for families at home with kids, that figure jumps up to 30%. Sensing an opportunity, the company has just refreshed the site to make it less of an afterthought and give it “a face and a presence of its own.”

“Parents are willing to spend anything to make their kids happy, within their financial means,” AT Media president Riva Syrop told AMO.

Apartment Therapy Media bills itself as “the only media company dedicated to life at home,” and as well as Cubby it publishes its eponymous home design site apartmenttherapy.com, cooking site The Kitchn and the college-focused Dorm Therapy.

Cubby launched as a newsletter in 2020 when AT Media identified “a real gap” in the parenting media market. “A lot of parenting sites have this hyper-focus on making your kids happy,” Syrop said. “Having raised a child in a small apartment in New York City, their crap can take over the entire space—and that’s not good for anyone.”

It grew to 50,000 subscribers “really, really rapidly,” she said, which prompted AT Media to build out a whole website. Even still, however, it had existed as a sort of little sister brand to the main titles, maintained with relatively low investment.

Last year, she said, the team decided “this has a lot more opportunity than we’re giving it credit for.”

The site spans reviews, meal ideas and home inspiration for families with kids of all ages: at the time of writing, stories on the homepage included advice for “screen-free entertainment,” a list of “colorful kids bedrooms [that] look like they belong in a Wes Anderson movie” and an article promising “a highly effective way to get Playdough out of carpet.”

While it makes more of its revenue from e-commerce than its sister sites, Cubby is still predominantly ad-funded: Syrop said around 40% of revenue comes from direct-sold advertising and 30% from programmatic.

The site had previously been organized into three main sections, Eat, Play and Live, which Syrop said had been fun, but “we thought we needed to be a lot more literal with what we were bringing forward.” The sections have been refreshed as Kid Rooms, Family Homes, Kid Food and Toys & Play.

AT Media can be viewed through the lens of life’s progression. A reader might first encounter the business with Dorm Therapy, moving on to the Apartment Therapy website when they get their first place and then onto Cubby when they start a family. Cubby alone addresses several stages of parenting: the site offers inspiration for setting up a nursery, but then also reconfiguring it as the child grows into a toddler and adapting it for the arrival of more kids.

At each of these stages, the family is probably going to, for example, need a new mattress—which they can shop for on Cubby. Mattresses do sell on AT Media’s other platforms, Syrop said, “but they’re selling in droves on Cubby.”

The Toys and Play section represents the company’s “big commerce push,” Syrop said. “It is, oddly, despite having a relatively small audience, a very effective shopping platform…

“Cubby is interesting, because if one just looked at the metrics like the revenue numbers versus other sites, you’d be like—‘meh!’ But when you start to look at the buying behaviors, it’s really differentiated—the average order value on Cubby is $180, which is very high. And from an audience perspective there’s huge conversion of buyers… because these people are actively looking for solutions.”

Cubby is profitable, although Syrop would not say by how much.  

Beyond the platform’s direct profitability, Syrop said it helps improve revenue at its sister brands. When AT Media proposes direct-sold advertising campaigns, it only includes Cubby as part of the plan in 10% of cases—but in those cases, they’re 40% more likely to be accepted. “While as a standalone site the revenue is fine, the value of having it as the fourth leg on our stool is significant.”

Although the entire portfolio targets people at different life stages, individual consumers aren’t necessarily sticking around as they age—not yet, at least.

“The goal now is to get really, really good about moving them through the other sites,” she said. “I would say we’re like 25% of the way there, but I think we have a lot of work to do, being honest.”

Visibility, Differentiation

The effect of Google’s rollout of AI Overviews and AI Mode, which reduces publisher visibility on the search platform, has varied by segment, Syrop said. In general, she said, their content had been helped by having “a personal point of view—so it’s not like, ‘to get a red wine stain out of your white t-shirt, use baking soda and whatever,’ it’s, ‘oh my gosh, I just spilled this on this! I tried these six things, this was my experience, this is how they all showed up, here’s photos of the outcome of everything.’”

This is “a little bit difficult to replicate on AI, which has served us well.” 

The brand has been trying to cope with the turbulence by encouraging reader registrations and by retaining readers “through differentiation”—in particular, rolling out new tools that give people a reason to come back, like a 3D room planning tool that lets users move virtual furniture around a space; a mood-boarding tool; and a user forum.

Some features require registrations while others don’t. “We want to be very, very thoughtful about how we’re speaking to our audience. Then once we’ve determined the best way to speak to them that provides value to them and also to us, that’s when we’ll start grabbing more.”

The refresh will also involve doubling Cubby’s editorial output, which Syrop said was in part driven by a desire to show up more in Google Discover, which she described as unpredictable but likely to provide “a steady stream” of traffic.

“You do need a bit more content in order to get the news platforms to notice you more often.”

The site’s Google SEO is otherwise strong, Syrop said. Cubby gets around 15% of its traffic directly to its home page, plus “a surprising amount of traffic from Flipboard… which is not the case with our other sites at all.” Its weekly newsletter also remains a reliable driver of visits.

There had been a little bit of softness on Apartment Therapy with commerce revenue, hit by tariff uncertainty, she said.

“People landing on our shopping content, and our click through from that content, is actually as strong as it ever was, interestingly. It’s the point of purchase conversion that is unusually soft the past three months, and it coincides awfully well with the tariff stuff.”

The Trump administration’s tariffs also introduced fear at publishers that ad spend was due to drop as brands waited to see what happened to the economy—but Syrop said what AT Media has seen has been a little more complicated.

“We’re having a huge year,” she said. “We’re just wrapping up by far our biggest Q2 ever, we’re already pacing to have our biggest Q3 ever.” Direct ad sales in Q2 were up 59% on last year, according to the company.

“The one trend I have noticed with direct advertisers is a significant delay on Q4 bookings… Our first big deals just started to close this week for Q4. So I think whereas normally we get to the end of September and we’re like, ‘okay, the year is done!’ I think we’re going to be hot at it until like the end of October this year.”

Syrop attributed that to advertisers’ wait-and-see attitude, which she said had been evident in Q2. “We’ve never executed in shorter timelines in my entire career. I don’t think my team slept for two months, in addition to our product team.”