Flip Fails. Condé Nast Reverses Strategy.

If you can’t beat ‘em, turn into a widget and join ‘em.

Condé Nast is changing strategies on Flip, its young-teen women social network that launched last February. They announced today that Flip will be “reshaped as a flexible web application designed to live on social networking platform, starting with Facebook.”

Translation: “We give up.” Comscore says Flip has dropped to around 100,000 monthly visitors from a high of half a million in May (see chart). Facebook has, by comparison, 100 million worldwide monthly visitors, or about 1,000 times the audience.

Condé Nast says that they’ll continue to operate the Flip.com website, but development and marketing efforts will shift to distributed applications.

So Flip turns, essentially, into one of thousands of Facebook applications. To date, the Flip application on Facebook has nine daily active users. This smells like deadpool to me.