There’s been some chatter about how Conde Nast’s tablet editions of its popular magazines, which have enjoyed a large increase in subscribers since the release of Apple’s Newsstand feature. It must be a pleasant surprise to the company, which as late as April was easing back on tablet content production after a less-than-stellar debut period. A lot can happen in six months, though: for example, 20 million iPads were sold. That’s a big increase in the demographic. And of course the designated channel for magazine-type content helps as well.
As pleasant as this news is (I’m all in favor of bringing print-quality content to digital devices), I think this portion of the tablet experience is still very much an early-adopter, minority share situation. They’re probably patting each other’s backs at Conde Nast, but the champagne is still in the fridge. → Read More
Condé Nast has unveiled a new iPad app called Idea Flight that they claim “is a new tool designed to share ideas, presentations, documents and designs easily and effectively.” One iPad user is a the “pilot” for a presentation and up to 15 “passenger” iPads can follow along via WiFi or Bluetooth. Idea Flight isn’t a general purpose presentation app, but it does look to make the iPad a more useful business device. Video and more after the jump. → Read More
Sites like Fashism, Go Try It On and Weardrobe have shown that there is intrinsic value in the ability to share photos of what you are wearing and get feedback on your style. So it makes sense for fashion magazines to start launching similar efforts as a way to build a community around their online content. Conde Nast’s Teen Vogue property is launching its own user generated street style fashion platform today, called Fashion Click, which is powered by content marketing company Tidal Labs.
Using Tidal Lab’s ContentMetric technology, the Teen Vogue Fashion Click platform allows fashionistas to contribute looks and descriptions of what they are wearing as they post to their own blogs. Tidal Lab’s algorithm identifies the more influential bloggers creating fashion looks and showcases content based upon posts most likely to be viewed. → Read More
This morning, top Reddit administrator/engineer Chris Slowe announced that he was leaving the social link sharing site to join Hipmunk, the flight search startup that closed a hyper-competitive angel round last month. Slowe joined Reddit back in 2005 as the company’s first employee — now he’ll be reunited with Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, both of whom are now at Hipmunk.
But why is Slowe leaving now?
Reddit’s traffic has been hitting record highs in the wake of Digg’s failed redesign, so the timing on this seems strange. → Read More
It’s no secret that social link sharing community Reddit isn’t singing the praises of its corporate parent Condé Nast, which acquired the company in 2006. Earlier today the two sparred over running ads in support of California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana in the state. And Reddit has previously written about the shortage of resources that Condé Nast is willing to provide. Now Ben Huh, founder and CEO of the Cheezburger network, is offering to take Reddit off Condé’s hands.
In a letter published by The Daily What (a part of the Cheezburger network), Huh writes that he’s offered to buy Reddit before privately, and he’s now making it public. From the post:
Condé Nast, I’m publicly offering to buy Reddit. → Read More
Late last week, news recommendation service reddit started soliciting users to donate i.e. subscribe to reddit gold in order to allow the Condé Nast-owned company to hire more people and buy more servers.
In a new blog post, reddit says approximately 6,000 users have donated to date. That represents less than 0.1 percent of reddit’s total number of users (unique visitors?), which comes in at roughly 8 million today, according to the company. → Read More
In a slightly odd blog post published Friday night, Condé Nast-owned news recommendation service reddit calls for help.
The company would love to hire engineers to complement the current technical team, which has been struggling with site sluggishness and outages lately and would also like to add some new features to reddit at some point.
However, they write, although the company is owned by a mega media corp with billions of dollars in revenue, there’s isn’t any budget to hire people and add more resources.
Its own revenues are too weak, they add, in a – refreshingly – brutally honest way. → Read More
We’ve heard about Conde Nast’s plans for iPad apps to showcase the publisher’s magazine content but with the release of apps on Apple’s App Store ahead of Saturday’s iPad launch, I found a gem of an app that would satisfy the tastes of any cook out there. Epicurious, which combines the content of shuttered magazine Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Self and user generated recipes, is a popular recipe database that features over 100,000 recipes, menus, articles, food guides and more. The cooking site’s companion, free iPad app just launched, and as an avid cook, it looks like a winner.
The app, which is similar in features to its sister iPhone app, is essentially a tabbed digital cookbook which allows you to access 27,000 recipes from both Gourmet and Bon Appetit. You can browse recipe collections, search via keyword, and filter your searches by what’s in your fridge, seasonal foods, holidays and more. You can add any recipe to your favorites box to save it as well as email recipes to yourself and others. → Read More
Print publishers are in a tizzy over Apple’s new iPad because they hope to finally be able to charge for their digital editions. But in order to get people to pay for their magazine and newspaper apps, they are going to have to offer something different that readers cannot get at the newsstand or on the open Web. We’ve already seen plenty of prototypes from magazine publishers which include interactive graphics, photo slide shows, and embedded videos.
But what should a magazine cover look like on the iPad? After all, the cover is still the gateway to the magazine. Theoretically, it will still be the first page people see, giving them hints of what’s inside and enticing them to dive into the issue. One way these covers could change is that instead of simply repurposing the static photographs from the print edition, the background image itself could be some sort of video loop. Jesse Rosten, a photographer in California, created the video mockup below of what a cover of Sunset Magazine might look like on the iPad. → Read More
It’s good to see at least one print media outlet start to get it. Conde Nast announced recently that Wired isn’t going to be the only one of their properties showing up on tablets; GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Glamour will be there as well. → Read More
Conde Nast has been working to fuse its fashion content with technology and social media. Lucky Magazine incorporated e-commerce into its online site and also partnered with Four Square. Today, Vogue Magazine is launching an innovative iPhone app that takes a page from social fashion startups like Polyvore and the Like.com’s Couturious.
The free app, called the Vogue Stylist, is meant to be used by women to do exactly what its name indicates: help style women’s wardrobes. Users can choose one of the trends highlighted by Vogue within the app and upload clothing they already own. Vogue Stylist will then produce stylish outfits from the pieces that reflect the current trend. The catch: Vogue will style outfits only with products from their advertisers. → Read More
Foursquare’s partnerships with media companies continue to add up. The location-based social network just inked a deal with restaurant rating guide Zagat, The New York Times, HBO, Warner Brothers, and the History Channel.
And a few weeks ago, Foursquare announced a partnership with Bravo. Today, the startup is expanding to the magazine sector with a partnership with Conde Nast’s Lucky Magazine. → Read More
The Academy Awards are just around the corner, and magazine Vanity Fair is launching a free branded iPhone app to promote its Oscar-related content. Famous for its Oscar night party and Hollywood pics, Vanity Fair is also encouraging users to make your Oscar picks on the app. You can download the app here.
Within the app, you make your picks for the award categories and receive realtime results on the night of the big show. You can also invite your friends to vote for the people you think have the best chance of winning, compare your selections to those of friends and Vanity Fair editors, and chat within the app via Facebook chat. On Oscar night, the app will show you who is winning from your picks. Of course, the app also offers access to Vanity Fair editorial content including background information on nominees, stories, photos, profiles, trailers of nominated films, and slideshows. → Read More
The magazine industry is falling over itself over a new shiny object. It wants to remake its product for a new class of digital tablets with color screens and touch screens. Today, a group of big publishers—Condé Nast, Time Inc., News Corp. Hearst, and Meredith—announced a joint venture to create standards for digital magazines to be read on tablets, e-readers, Web phones, and the like. The consortium will also create a digital newsstand to sell electronic copies of its magazines. These will be more like downloadable apps than Websites—think of it as an App Store for Magazines, where you can find and download magazine issues and subscriptions in app form.
The existence of this App Store for Magazines (and newspapers, presumably) raises a big question. Why are these print publishers reinventing the digital wheel? A popular app store already exists. It’s called iTunes. And people don’t mind paying for apps there. By creating their own app store, the magazine publishers can avoid paying Apple its 30 percent cut of sales. But that’s not the real reason.
The real reason they want their own store is the customer data. → Read More
Whenever companies do something inexplicable, the nerd in me always comes back to that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Richard Dreyfus keeps building models of a mountain, culminating in a huge, muddy mess in his kitchen. Throughout it all he keeps saying “This means something.” Well, the latest molehill into a mountain is the move by Time Inc. and Conde Nast, among others, to build a tablet-based interface for their flagship titles. This means something, but what it means is that the homes of Time and Gourmet (oh, wait), aren’t going to take the coming industrial disruption lying down. → Read More
In a world where Facebook and Twitter dominate the headlines, it’s easy to forget that other social properties, like Reddit still send a ton of traffic to sites. But they absolutely do, and now you can buy your way into that. Starting today, Reddit is testing out a new closed beta experiment to allow anyone to purchase a sponsored link on Reddit’s homepage. Yes, that means you, not just some random advertiser. And not just the homepage, it’s the top overall link.
Now, obviously, this link will be clearly labeled as “sponsored,” but that shouldn’t make it that much less of an enticing opportunity for some individuals who want to drive traffic to their site. Reddit says it sees anywhere from a 2% to a 10% click-through-rate on the ads that run in this area. At the very least, this should mean thousands of hits coming to your site that wouldn’t otherwise get. → Read More
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. → Read More
There are no shortage of job listing sites out there, especially in this economy. But how do you know if the jobs listed on any of them are actually any good? Why not vote on them?
Not surprisingly, that’s a key selling point of Reddit Jobs, a new job listing site branded by the popular social voting site. Just with the regular Reddit site, on the main page you’ll see a list of content — in this case, jobs — and you can give any of them an “up” or “down” vote depending on if you like them or not. “We think this is a pretty sweet opportunity for employers to find great tech-savvy folks and learn more about how they’re perceived by potential employees,” Luke Groesbeck, the co-founder of JobAlchemist (which created the site for Reddit), tells us. → Read More
Conde Nast is shutting down its glossy business magazine Portfolio, two years after its launch. Conde Nast famously poured $100 million to launch the publication, which went on an expensive hiring spree in 2007 in its attempt to take on Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week. The magazine always seemed to me to have an unhealthy fixation with Wall Street and the hedge fund boom over other industries, but as Wall Street cratered nobody wanted to read those stories anymore. The drop in print advertising, down 26 percent in the first quarter, didn’t help matters either.
Portfolio saw itself in the same vein as the Fortune magazine of the 1930s, filled with lush photographs and long narratives. But that formula doesn’t work in an age where business is about speed, not leisure or luxury. It also doesn’t work in an age where monthly magazines in general are increasingly challenged by the wealth of instantaneous business news available on the Web. (And you thought the daily newspapers had it tough). Portfolio’s insistence on favoring its print over its Website content also helped to hasten its demise. If you are going to start a magazine these days, the Website has to come first. The magazine companies still don’t realize this simple fact. → Read More
Condé Nast has acquired popular technology blog Ars Technica (ranked #5 all time on the BloggerBoard), we’ve confirmed. The site will become part of Wired Digital (which in turn is under CondéNet, run by Sarah Chubb). Wired Digital assets include Wired.com and Reddit (acquired in 2006). The acquisition price will not be disclosed, but our sources say it is in the $25 million range, which is what Condé Nast paid for Wired.com in 2006. Effectively, Ars Technica is now part of Wired. Look for an official announcement next week. This marks a new beginning for Ars Technica, which was originally founded in 1998 by Ken “Caesar” Fisher (based in Boston) and Jon “Hannibal” Stokes (based in Chicago). They, along with their 8 or so employees, will remain with the company as it is integrated into Wired Digital. Comscore says Ars Technica has just 1.5 million monthly unique visitors and 4 million page views, but our understanding is that the actual number of unique visitors to the site is around 4.5 million. The audience demographic is very similar to Wired, although our sources say the overlap is relatively small. This is also another lost customer for Federated Media Publishing, which sells advertising for Ars Technica (Digg left Federated Media last year to accept a very lucrative Microsoft deal that will pay out over $100 million over three years). CondéNet will now take over advertising sales. CrunchBase Information Ars Technica Condé Nast Ken “Caesar” Fisher Jon “Hannibal” Stokes Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
