Shopping site Style.com shut down by Condé Nast after only 9 months

Barely nine months after it launched Style.com, Condé Nast has closed the online e-commerce site into which it is said to have invested $100 million. According to a story in the New York Times, visitors to the website are redirected to Farfetch, an online marketplace for high-end boutiques into for which Conde Nast was an early investor.

"The move is a stunning strategic backtrack by the publishing empire,"  [said the Times story] "which first announced a multimillion-dollar rebranding of Style.com, formerly the encyclopedic digital home of all Condé Nast runway coverage, in 2015. It also reflects the current turmoil in the glossy magazine industry, which has struggled to adapt to the digital age. 

“Our experience with Style.com taught us that content is a powerful driver of commerce, and the combination of great editorial with a great shopping experience creates a great user experience and revenue upside,” said Matt Starker, the general manager of digital strategy at Condé Nast. He acknowledged, however, that the skill sets required to create content and those required to run a seamless shopping site were different.

Fuel Digital of Montreal to rep Condé Nast French properties across Canada

Fuel Digital Media of Montreal has been selected to represent Francophone properties of Condé Nast across Canada, including such brands as GQmagazine.fr, VanityFair.fr, Vogue.fr and GlamourParis.com. On the company's website, John Sclapari, founding president of Fuel, said

"Focusing on women's & men's lifestyle, as well as international cultural events, Condé Nast Publications contribute to consolidate our position in the category Lifestyle, The addition of these new sites to those of our "Lifestyle" vendors such as Gentside.com, Ohmymag.com and FashionStyleMag.com not only allows us to enrich our offering in this market coveted by advertisers, but also to extend our reach to influential and affluent consumers."

Condé Nast and Hearst in talks about shared services

Two of the biggest players in the U.S. and international magazine industry -- Condé Nast and Hearst -- are apparently in talks to share services, at least in the U.S. This would see Hearst Magazine Publishing Services (HMPS) offering print and digital services to Condé Nast and third party publishers.

HMPS is an extension of the dominant fulfillment and data company CDS Global which operates as a separate entity from Hearst (and which advertises on this blog). Potential clients could have access to Hearst's digital asset management system as well as consumer marketing, consultation around content creation and advertising sales, procurement, production, Web site, app and e-edition development, financial management or subscription and fulfillment management.

According to a story in WWD, Hearst Magazines president David Carey has been in talks with incoming Condé Nast chief executive officer Bob Sauerberg about becoming a client. 

CDS already manages certain end-to-end outsourcing for 450 print and digital publishers, including such functions as order management, payment and customer service. Current clients include magazines from big publishers like Condé Nast and Rodale to smaller ones like August Home Publishing and Garden & Gun LLC.

Readers spend similar times with print, digital and both, says Condé Nast Britain study

A British study of readers and their print and digital tablets has found that readers use them much the same way and with similar "dwell times" (a term used in the British magazine industry for reading time.)

Carried out by Condé Nast Britain, the publisher of Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair, GQ and Wired the research , which is reported by Campaign magazine, is said to be the first such "like-for-like" study of print and digital tablet reader relationships.  

The reading behaviour study questioned 6,965 subscribers who read the titles in print or digital, including iPad, Android and across platforms (both print and digital) and it was verified by YouGov. It found that in addition to time spent, print and digital magazines were read in a very similar way – eg, front to back – irrespective of format.

Nicholas Coleridge, president of Condé Nast International and managing director of Condé Nast Britain, told Campaign: "This research debunks for all time the assumption that people read print and digital magazines in different ways, and for different periods of time."

(The research results were released just ahead of the release of six-monthly Audit Bureau of Circulations figures which, like in North America, are expected to report significant falls in newsstand sales.)

Among the dwell times reported by Condé, Vogue showed 122 minutes for print, 116 for digital and 162 minutes for print and digital. Vanity Fair showed 169 minutes for print, 154 for digital and print plus digital was 188 minutes. 

Condé Nast buys into cloud-based advertising with stake in digital technology company

It may be just a fleeting business story or it may be a significant bellwether of where things are going in the relationship between media companies and advertisers -- and, not least, readers. Condé Nast, which publishes many of the best-recognized consumer magazines in the world, has bought into a company that provides so-called cloud-based advertising technology which allows marketers to change their ads on the fly, according to a story in the New York Times.

It has bought an 11% share in Flite, a digital advertising company whose system allows advertisers to change their ads as they see which images or messages are most popular with users (what we used to call readers) so they can change things up, emphasizing elements that get the most clicks or comments.

Josh Stinchcomb, vice president for corporate partnerships at Condé Nast, said Flite’s technology allowed the company to provide more creative and customized options for advertisers online.

“We do a lot of custom advertising work for our clients,” he said. “I think we’re always trying to find that balance between design flexibility and standardization.”

Publish once, read anywhere;Condé Nast's Rick Levine on the company's strategy

Magazines Canada has posted a video of the recent presentation in Toronto by Richard Levine VP Editorial Operations, Condé Nast. Click on this link

Mega-Vogue's growth linked to shopping site

The September issue of Vogue has always seemed as though it should come with its own set of wheels; this September's issue is its biggest ever, with 727 advertising pages, proclaiming itself "extra, extra large".

The growth in pages, according to a story in the New York Times, seems to have been achieved by closely linking print advertising with ShopVogue.TV, a potent form of "added value" which offers links so viewers can purchase products featured in the print ads, and shows videos of runway shows, fashion ad campaigns. Each advertiser who bought a national page qualified for inclusion on the site.

For Vogue, which is owned by the Condé Nast Publications unit of Advance Publications, the channel is a major push into the world of fashion-related video entertainment; the channel will start with more than 240 minutes of original online video content.

“America seems to be very interested in entertainment about fashion,” said Thomas A. Florio, publishing director of Vogue.

ShopVogue.TV is not technically a retail site; the “shop” function allows visitors to click through to the Web sites of the advertisers or their online merchant partners. Vogue does not take a cut of any of the sales made through its site. (Condé Nast, which is privately held, does not disclose its finances and declined to say how much was spent on this campaign.)

Vogue expects to draw about half a million visitors to the channel in the first few months, or first “season.” The channel will be advertised on fashion Web sites, on the sides of 270 Manhattan buses, and, of course, in the print pages of September Vogue.