Condé Nast recently acquired Boston-based Reddit, a social news site that has always played second fiddle to Digg, although Reddit does have an active and loyal userbase. Users praise Reddit for having a very quick load time and no advertising. Like Digg, news stories on Reddit are submitted by users, and other users vote up or down the story. When it gets enough "up" votes, the story appears on the home page. All four Reddit employees will relocate from Boston to Wired's SF office, becoming a part of Wired Digital. Listen also to the interview with the Reddit founders on Techcrunch. Yet another example how big publishers try to go "beyond print" embracing new audiences (Wired will leave Reddit as a standalone site) and within their existing web properties.
Barry Diller to build "Internet Conde Nast"
To compete with Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc., Barry Dillers' InterActiveCorp more and more "has to become a buyer" of sites as ads move to the Web and online visits begin at venues like MySpace.com instead of search engines, says Internet consultant Chuck Richard (via Bloomberg). IAC has a stable of 61 brands including CollegeHumor.com (added in August), Match.com and HSN, the home shopping channel. According to CEO Barry Diller, "it's all content. I've always believed that if you have audience, money will follow".
Yet, unlike other Web information companies such as Yahoo - which folds its products under one brand - the IAC's sites will be freestanding entities with a loose affiliation, said Michael Jackson, the head of IAC's new programming unit that will debut several Web sites this year. "Think of it like a series of magazines, a portfolio of content business like Conde Nast that have a strong relationship with their audiences".
While Diller said the initial investment on the programming division will be small, sites can produce "strong revenue relatively quickly" once the audience arrives. Technology has evolved to the point where Web Sites can attract and sustain audiences that watch adls like on television, Diller said. IAC's media & advertising division, which includes Ask.com and Citysearch, reported revenue of $131 million in the second quarter, a fraction of IAC's $1.61 billion in total revenue.
Hearst adds user-generated content to websites
(via Brand Republic) The National Magazine Company has relaunched the websites of Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Country Living as part of a major revamp with a focus on user-generated content and community. Basically, the redesigns will take advantage of user-generated content to incorporate blogging - and in the future will also offer more functional Web 2.0 technology.
"We have been soft launching the sites over the past couple weeks, but this will lead to hard launches with the publication dates of magazines in question", said Duncan Edwards, CEO of NatMags. The move follows the £22m acquisition of the women's portal Handbag.com and its network of websites from the Telegraph Group.
Conde Nast lines up magazine web launches
Recently, Condé Nast consumer-parenting magazine Cookie rolled out its new website, splashed with multicolored text and photos and new blogs. Before Cookie, it was Men's Vogue coming out off CondéNet's reassambly line, with Web-only features including an audio interview with novelist James Ellroy and slideshows (and there's a Men's Vogue blog in the works, according to a CondéNast source). Three weeks before that, it was Glamour, which added an interactive feature "in which readers give blogger Alyssa Shelasky's love life the Subservient Chicken treatment."
Still awaiting their turn are titles including Vanity Fair - which is due to relaunch next month - Lucky, Teen Vogue and The New Yorker. Says Sarah Chubb, CondéNet's president: "We are playing in a space that is very aggressive, and things have to change fast." So along with CondéNet, the tech-boom-survivor purveyor of Web sites Avenue A/Razorfish had a hand in the Cookie and Men's Vogue redesigns, and is also working on a planned destination site for teengage girls, launching before year's end.
US publishers shed media assets
Last week, two of America's most powerful publishing companies announced plans to shed major assets, to better position their core offering for the future - yet pursuing markedly different paths. Time Warner announced that it was putting 18 of its 50 magazines in the US up for sale, including some of the most venerable special interest titles. The question that lies behind: Can traditional publishing provide the kind of growth required by a public company?
Samir Husni, a professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi (also known as "Mr. Magazine") summed up the sale: "Time is saying they think there's a future for the big general interest magazine, but also predicting the demise of spcial interest titles that are not extremely specialized". According to a recent NYT article, a sale would land nicely on Wall Street, and with earnings of about $1 billion, Time Inc.'s cash flow would also be very attractive to venture capital funds that are shopping for big media plays.
The New York Times Company announced that it plans to sell its Broadcast Media Group, which includes nine network-affiliated television stations and their related properties. "The decision to explore the sale of our broadcast stations is a result of our ongoing analysis of our business portfolio," said Janet L. Robinson, president and CEO of the Times Company. "We believe a divestiture would allow us to sharpen our focus on developing our newspaper and rapidly growing digital businesses, and the synergies between them, thereby increasing the value of our Company for our shareholders."
And where is Time Inc. heading? Last Friday, Ann S. Moore, the company's chief executive, made a presentation to the Time Warner leadership, telling them she planned on building the business around six verticals of interest: sports, entertainment, business, news, health and home. In a phone interview, she was wildly enthusiastic about digital growing perspectives, yet she did not minimize the downsides of the task ahead. "We can't just take all our old magazine people and turn them into multiplatform geniuses [...] I think it may well be true that I have to shrink Time Inc. in order to grow it, but it will grow again".
Conde Nast no longer mere magazine company
Condé Nast does not like to be called a mere magazine company. Richard Beckman, president of Condé Nast media group, said in an interview: "We're content providers - we're a company that provides content". Thus, the latest version of the company's "Fashion Rocks" extravaganza features a concert with Elton John and other top performers to be broadcast in 20 countries, a star-studded after-party, an E! red carpet special and a fund-raiser for AIDS - and a print magazine, supervised by Anna Wintour of Vogue.
According to NY Times, nowadays "the art of staying relevant means staging outsize, razzle-dazzle productions that incorporate other media, but have relatively little to do with the print product." With success: Fashion Rocks today is four times the size it was at its debut in 2004.
The website fashionrocks06.com contains video, promotions and commentary on fashion, beauty and music. Parties associated with the event are to be held at store like Prada and Guess. And advertisers seem to demand more than the print product from magazine companies lately. Fahion Rocks has brought in upward of $45 million in ad revenues. "For us, it was really interesting to be involved in a truly integrated marketing program that includes a major event like Fashion Rocks, plus all of the reach that Condé Nast can provide", said John Burbank form Cingular Wireless, one of the top four advertisers.
It seems this really could be the future of multi-platform marketing for media, creating communities.
Holtzbrinck to launch eLab
Traditional media and publishing companies are realizing the potential of Social Software, Local Markets and eCommerce. Verlagsgruppe Holtzbrinck "officially" launched its new media incubator eLab a few days ago, developing mobile and web applications. Stephan Roppel, Head of Strategy of the Verlagsgruppe von Holtbrinck, founded eLab, and his "wings" are Michael Munz and Arnd Benninghoff.
Some projects which already have been launched (thanks to azrael74):
- Pointoo - a Plazes-like site that connects people at their location
- Kiwoo - tag cloud experimenting with Google AdSense
- GuteFrage - similar to Lycos IQ
- German Blogs
It will be interesting to watch how those and other new media projects will develop.
Newspapers of the Web
What could be the future shape of online news media? Maybe news-aggregating site digg.com is a blue print in applying "social networking" to news. Michael Arrington says "Digg is looking more and more like the newspaper of the web". Digg which started in late 2004 already has more online traffic than The Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the Wall Street Journal or USA Today, according to Alexa.com - yet online market researcher Hitwise and Nielsen showed the New York Times still ahead by sizable margins.
So what's the big difference between those two? Times Stories were picked by human journalists, at Digg visitors themselves recommend and then rank news items they find interest online by voting (Netscape.com has become a similar visitor-powered news site). Every reader nowadays can choose between the "unedited" Digg (with a staff of 15) and the edited Times models.
The wisdom of crowds: on Digg, 360,000 registered users recommend more than 4,000 stories a day from traditional news sources, bloggers and websites. And traditional newspapers increasingly are making their websites more responsive and experimenting with more interactivity. The Times recently launched a limited beta test of MyTimes, which will let visitors create their own personalized homepage, including material from other favorite online sources using RSS. What do you think about 100 percent user-driven news sites?
For Business Magazines, it's all about the web
Media Life recently covered the importance of web extensions from print business magazines. US publishers see their sites accounting for an even-greater share of revenue. For example, BusinessWeek's site will account for up to 13 percent of total ad revenues this year according to president Bill Kupper.
Vivek Shah, president of digital publishing for the Time Inc Business and Financial unit, says CNNMoney.com is the "backbone of profit growth". CNNMoney ranks fourth in traffic and drew 7.336 million million unique visitors in June, seeing double-digit growth.
Interesting is how this is changing the way business news is reported and published as print editions may be forced to reassess how they cover news. Just one example: Forbes.com is far more of the moment with news tickers, a personalized section (Forbes.com Attache), financial video reports - on the print side, Forbes seems to be far more analytical.
Yet it becomes clear print and online must work together - and there's a chance in creating new opportunities in print: "The new way to launch a print publication is to launch it online first and test it", Business Week's Kupper says. Web channel IN: Inside Innovation e.g. has become a section in the print magazine.
How Condé Nast expands digital
Having posted a lot on Time Inc. digital moves lately, I now found a New York Times article (via Mediapost) explaining how Condé Nast stepps up its digital activities. The review covers the magazine as well as destination sites, both managed through Condé’s online arm Advance.net.
Leading destination sites are: epicuirous.com and coincierge.com (1.6 mio. vistors) and style.com – the latter two reported to be profitable. Currently, Condé builds up brides.com to better compete with theknot.com. And, “Condé Nast is preparing another new site…for teenage girls. And its new business magazine… will have a large Internet component”.
This also translates into hiring web editors for “all its 29 consumer magazines” and “giving its advertising sales force incentives to sell space simultaneously online and in print” and “the company created an Internet specialist team to handle large corporate ad accounts”
The destination sites have much higher traffic than the magazines sites. However, their value becomes clearer, too: Self.com generated more than 100.000 subscriptions a year for the corresponding fitness magazine. And Vanity Fair could attract more than 350,000 people a day posting videos of the Scarlett Johansson cover shoot its website.
Advance.net Chairman Steve Newhouse explains the goal: "You gain a broader audience and more loyalty from your subscribers if you extend the experience into the Web."
