Monday, April 03, 2006
As Magazine Readers Increasingly Turn to the Web, So Does Condé Nast
Getting married and wondering how you would look in a mermaid-style sheath? Brides.com, a new Web site, takes you to a virtual fitting room, lets you pick from one of four body types and examine how each would look in six different styles of gowns.
Brides.com, an upgraded bridal site combining content from three different magazines, comes from Condé Nast, which, like many magazine publishers, is trying to build its Web presence to keep up with a generation of readers who automatically turn to the Internet instead of the printed page.
In addition to brides.com, Condé Nast is preparing another new site, still unnamed, for teenage girls. And its new business magazine, which is to begin publishing next year, will have a large Internet component with original content.
These investments mark a new level of commitment to the Web by Condé Nast, the nation's second-biggest magazine publisher after the Time Inc. division of Time Warner, and reflect the new reality in the magazine industry: The Internet is an indispensable companion to print.
"You gain a broader audience and more loyalty from your subscribers if you extend the experience into the Web," said Steven Newhouse, chairman of Advance.net, which oversees the local Web sites of the Newhouse newspapers and the Web sites of Condé Nast, all of which are owned by Advance Publications.
While newspapers, their cousins in print, have been forced to confront the shifting appetite for news online and have watched their advertisers migrate to cyberspace, magazines have felt less of a need to reorient themselves. For one thing, the drops in circulation for magazines have been less drastic than for newspapers. For another, magazines have always had a more relaxed, if not intimate, relationship with their readers, who tend to set aside precious leisure time to read them.
"They still think in terms of pages and ink," Mike Neiss, a senior vice president of Universal McCann, the advertising and marketing firm in New York, said of magazine editors. "They look at it the way you'd look at Nixon doing standup you can't really stretch the brand as far as you think you can."
But having seen the newspaper business staggered by a defection to the Internet, and with their own circulation figures flat, magazine companies are making new investments in the Web. The undertaking appears significant at Condé Nast, which is freer than most with its spending. (The company is private and its finances closely held.)
Condé Nast's new bridal site is instructive. The company watched the circulation of its bridal magazines be drained away by a Web site called theknot.com, a wedding resource that began online in 1996. At stake: millions of young, love-struck eyeballs desperate for tips and ideas in what has become a $160-billion-a-year wedding industry.
Condé Nast has now hired two dozen people to manage brides.com. It is also hiring Web editors for all of its 29 consumer magazines, about half of which have such editors now.
"The sense of urgency, the sense of moment, has arrived," said David Remnick, editor in chief of The New Yorker, and among those at Condé Nast searching for a Web editor.
Thomas J. Wallace, Condé Nast's editorial director, said his mantra to editors was to "enrich" the Web experience, and the company was prepared to foot the bill. "Tell us the cost and benefit, and if the return on investment is great enough, you get the money," he said.
He added that the sites, which are all free to users, were works in progress. "We're in the process of figuring it out and will be in the process of figuring it out for the rest of my working life," he said. "Our spending may have to be ahead of our ability to make money."
Six months ago, for the first time, the company started giving its advertising sales force incentives to sell space simultaneously online and in print, said Sarah Chubb, president of CondéNet, the company's online division. In December, she said, the company created an Internet specialist team to handle large corporate ad accounts.
Condé Nast jumped into the Web a decade ago with a decision to build a "destination" site, epicurious.com. It used some content from two of its magazines, Gourmet and Bon Appétit, but without using those brand names. It has subsequently built other destination sites, such as style.com, with content from Vogue and W; and concierge.com, from Condé Nast Traveler.
Ms. Chubb said that not using the magazine names allowed the company to cast a wider net for readers beyond those already buying the magazines. She said the decision proved right: epicurious.com and style.com are both profitable.
Moreover, having sites unattached to a magazine brand allowed the sites to be more playful. "The brands are so strong, they require living within their identity," she said. "We felt that to be a really good Web property, we needed to be flexible."
Still, the Condé Nast sites draw relatively little traffic compared with the most popular mass-market magazine sites, according to comScore Networks, which measures Web traffic. The three most popular magazine sites, as of February, were those for Entrepreneur, Forbes and Sports Illustrated. Entrepreneur.com drew more than 6 million unique visitors that month, according to comScore; epicurious.com, Condé Nast's most popular site, drew 1.6 million.
But even epicurious.com drew nearly five times the traffic of Condé Nast's most popular single magazine site, which in February was vanityfair.com, with 346,000 visitors (more about them later).
The destination sites are the models for brides.com, which combines material from the company's three bridal magazines, Bride's, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride, and adds original online features. Many top managers at brides.com came from epicurious.com and concierge.com.
The company's bridal magazines and their old Web sites had lost considerable ground to theknot.com over the last few years. Theknot.com draws 2.1 million unique visitors a month, or about 14 percent of all bridal site traffic, according to Hitwise, an Internet research firm. The old sites for Bride's and Modern Bride drew a little more than 1 percent of that traffic each, and their combined print circulation as of December was less than 700,000.
"One hundred percent of the people who are getting married for the first time are people who grew up on the Internet," said Marshal Cohen, who is chief analyst for the NPD Group, a market research firm.
"A magazine can spark an idea but the Internet will provide the real vehicle for deep research, the purchase of products and the referral system to friends. So you can say, 'I saw this great dress, you should see it, you've got to go online.' "
For magazines that are not absorbed into a larger destination site, the model, if not the inspiration, at Condé Nast is Self magazine. Its Web site, self.com, which features a popular fitness challenge, generated more than 100,000 subscriptions last year, according to Mr. Wallace. The print circulation was 1.4 million last year.
"What happened at Self is very important for Condé Nast," Mr. Wallace said, adding that while self.com had drawn only a fraction of the traffic of style.com, it had generated more than twice the subscriptions.
Lucy S. Danziger, editor in chief of Self, said that the keys to the site's success were its interactivity ("Find your ideal weight and more! Crunch your numbers with our cool tools.") and the forums for like-minded readers, who are, say, training for a marathon or trying to lose weight after having a baby. "We've generated new types of content that lend itself to this medium," she said.
The company is encouraging its other magazines to do the same.
At Jane, for example, Brandon Holley, the new editor in chief, uses extensive video on her site, which was redesigned last month. Film students regularly visit the magazine's offices and take short videos of the staff at work. "Our beauty editor will show people how to cover up a zit on a fellow staffer," she said. Every editor is supposed to post blogs two or three times a week.
For monthly magazines, it is a challenge to keep a Web site feeling fresh. Vanity Fair, for one, provides links to various celebrity-oriented and party sites, which keep things current, and it gives readers sneak peeks of the upcoming issue.
Vanity Fair is also using more video, showing outtakes from its cover photo shoots. While the site normally draws about 6,000 viewers a day, Mr. Wallace said, a recent video of a much-discussed cover shoot of Tom Ford, the fashion designer, and two naked actresses, Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley (and nice product placement for Poland Spring water), drew nearly 350,000 people in one day.
"Think of that," Mr. Wallace exclaimed. "How do we do it again?" he asked, then quickly added, "And is this the direction we want to go?"
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