Nearly three months after shedding glossy business magazine Portfolio, publisher Condé Nast has hired external consultants from McKinsey to assist in some serious cost-cutting continuation, Yahoo-style.
First online property to go after the word of the hire got out: Men.Style.com, the media company’s web-only brand for – you guessed it – men.
In a memo that got republished all over the web yesterday, Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend told his staff that it is time to “rethink” the entire business, warning that the company must “realign to be a successful business in an emerging economy that is now predicted to be painfully slow in recovering.”
In this environment, it’s indeed not the best choice to keep three men’s fashion titles on the web, as Condé Nast Digital president Sarah Chubb admitted to Advertising Age:
“It didn’t really make sense to do so because lifestyle content from GQ was already the main traffic driver for Men.Style.com. Further, the view among Conde Nast execs is that a unified print-web brand will be an easier sell to brand advertisers.”
After the launch of both sites, Men.Style.com – launched back in 2005 – traffic will refer to GQ.com and the original staffers will move along with it.
According to Condé Nast’s internal numbers, Men.Style.com saw 1.7 million unique visitors last month, up nearly 50% from the same month last year. The umbrella website, Style.com, had 2 million monthly UVs. ComScore paints a different picture, putting Men.Style.com at 386,000 unique visitors and Style.com at 656,000 in June.