Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Conde Nast Publications

Next Issue Media Is The “Netflix For Digital Magazines”

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 19:53:15 +0000

Even though the iPad has been around for two years, it has not made much of an impact on the digital magazine market. Digital magazines make up only 1% of the industry circulation total and the publishers know that this could be a problem. This is why Next Issue Media has announced an Android app, which encourages users to read more publications on their tablet. Next Issue is a joint venture between five magazine publishers: Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredeth, News Corp. and Time Inc.

Next Issue Media is considered the “Netflix for digital magazines.” Subscribers would pay for a fixed monthly fee and would get access to a virtual newsstand. By paying $10 per month you would get unlimited access to the digital editions of Next Issue’s entire catalog of magazines, which are custom-designed for the tablet. By adding another $5 per month, you would also get access to weekly magazines like THe New Yorker. Currently there are 32 magazines in the newsstand that include Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Vanity Fair, and Esquire.

The app is currently only supported on Android Honeycomb tablets, but there is no word on whether it will be available on the iPad, Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble Nook. The Next Issue Media Android app has a 30-day free trial.

Allure Magazine and Amazon.com’s Quidsi Partner On E-Commerce

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 14:23:11 +0000

Conde Nast publication Allure magazine and Amazon.com subsidiary Quidsi have partnered with each other on an e-commerce project. Allure magazine’s website will start having a major focus on e-commerce. Quidsi operates websites such Diapers.com and BeautyBar.com.

Soap.com and BeautyBar.com will be placing some of their beauty products right into the Allure magazine website. Allure will have a new feature called “Allure Beauty Product Finder,” which will match users with personalized product recommendations.

Allure said that “expert panel of cosmetic chemists, dermatologists, makeup artists, and hairstylists” have checked out all the products to ensure that only the best are featured.

When checking out, users will be taken to a co-branded page on BeautyBar.com. Amazon.com acquired Quidsi last November. Allure receives 1.2 million unique visitors per month.

[paidContent]

Condé Nast Considering Spinning Off Reddit

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:59:00 +0000

Condé Nast acquired Reddit five years ago and now they are considering spinning them off again. Condé Nast would continue to own the website but they are talking to investors about selling a stake in the company with a $200 million valuation. Reddit saw tremendous growth after Digg released a new, less favorable version of their website. Reddit recently saw one billion page views in one month. “We love our Reddit asset, and it’s a core asset for us, and it’s getting more valuable every day,” stated Advance Publications digital operations head Steve Newhouse. [AllThingsD]

Reddit Asks Users For Donations Due To Lack Of Resources

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:49:11 +0000

Reddit is asking for donations from their users because the news aggregation service is constantly dealing with website downtime. Reddit has only 4 employees despite being acquired by Condé Nast.

“Whenever this topic comes up on the site, someone always posts a comment about how reddit is owned by Conde Nast, a billion-dollar corporation like Time Warner or Cobra, and how if they wanted to they could hire a thousand engineers and purchase a million dollars worth of heavy iron. But here’s the thing: corporations aren’t run like charities. They keep separate budgets for each business line, and usually allocate resources proportionate to revenue. And reddit’s revenue isn’t great,” said the company in a blog post.

Reddit receives about 280 million pageviews per month, making it hard for four people to sustain the website, let alone come up with new features. Reddit hopes that users will donate money in order to hire more people and buy additional servers. The company prides itself on having minimal advertising.

[TechCrunch]

Discontinued Paper Magazine Gourmet Magazine Back In Business On iPad

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:41:11 +0000

Gourmet Magazine is a publication owned by Conde Nast that was shut down this past October. But now they are back… on the iPad as an application called Gourmet Live. “We closed the magazine last fall but we did not close the brand,” said Conde Nast president of consumer marketing Robert Sauerberg.

Gourmet Live will be made available for free and is expected to be released in the fourth quarter of this year. Conde Nast partnered with New York consulting firm Activate to develop Gourmet Live. Activate is led by Anil Dash and Michael Wolf. Conde Nast will allow users to share articles on social websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Articles can also be tagged as favorites.

[New York Times]

Reddit Co-Founders Quit Conde Nast 3 Years After Acquisition

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:00:26 +0000

Three years ago, Conde Nast bought out Reddit. Reddit is a website where a community of users vote on the most interesting stories. The most interesting recent stories land on the Reddit homepage and receive a large number of visits. Conde Nast has been taking a hit lately as its been discovered that they may lose $1 billion in ad revenue this year.

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian both founded Reddit after launching it from Y-Combinator. Christopher Rowe and Aaron Swartz joined the team shortly after the company was founded. Y-Combinator is an incubation firm started by Paul Graham. Both of the Reddit founders are leaving for personal reasons.

Huffman is moving back to Virginia to spend more time with his wife. Ohanian plans to spend some time traveling. Rowe will be staying with Reddit for a while. Swartz was fired from Reddit two years ago for not respecting the company rules after being acquired by Wired Magazine.

Reddit Has Opened Their Source Code

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:36:13 +0000

Reddit, the social bookmarking website that was acquired by CondÃ© Nast in November 2006Â Â has opened up their source code.Â The source code is available at http://code.reddit.com.Â

The success of Digg and Reddit have inspired many companies to start their own social bookmarking sites.Â Netscape started and closed down Propeller and Mixx hasÂ risen as a favorite.Â Â Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo! andÂ StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay.Â MySpace, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Live also have social bookmarking features.Â Digg still remains as Reddit’s biggest competitor.Â Going open source is one way that Reddit has one-upped Digg.

Ever since Reddit was acquired by CondÃ© Nast, the company’s monthly uniques has grown by 4.4 million and page views have grown by 120 million according to co-founder Steve Huffman.Â Reddit will be launching a new design and a partnership with PBS shortly.

Reddit is a product of Y-Combinator.

Wired Acquires Technology Blog, Ars Technica

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 16 May 2008 23:36:46 +0000

The digital entity of Wired Magazine, Wired.com has acquired Ars Technica.Â Ars Technica is a technology blog that was started in 1998 by Ken “Caesar” Fisher.Â Ars Technica has 3 operating revenue sources: affiliate sales commissions, advertising through Federated Media, user subscription fees, and sales of Ars brand merchandise.

Ars Technica focuses on topics such as Technology and Culture, CPU Theory & Praxis, Hardware, Infinite Loop (about Apple), One Microsoft Way (about Microsoft), Open Ended (open source software), Kit (hardware), Nobel Intent (science), and Opposable Thumbs (video games).

The financial details were undisclosed, but TechCrunch speculates that the amount was around the range of $25 million in cash.Â Ars Technica receives about 1.5 million monthly unique visitors and 4 million page views.Â

Condé Nast Social Network, Flip.com Flops, Now Pursuing a Widget Strategy

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:51:20 +0000

CondÃ© Nast’s Flip.com is a social network for young teenager with features that include Flipbooks, Member channels like (writing/poetry, friends/family, movies/tv, art/photography, opinions/rants, pets/animals, etc.).Â Rather than closing down the social network completely and rebuilding from the ground up, Flip will take widgets and embed them into other social networks for the purpose of building their own user-base.Â Interesting move.

Flip.com supposedly has about 300,000 users.Â The company started almost a year ago with the goal of making a place for teenage girls to showcase their hobbies.Â Flip recently debuted as a Facebook application and according to TechCrunch, there are only 9 active users on that application as of right now.Â

“Flipâ€™s demographic is perfectly aligned with Facebook.Â Weâ€™ve made 300,000 girls incredibly happy, but thereâ€™s millions of them on Facebook. And we know theyâ€™re interested the same kinds of tools that are available there. It would be a whole lot harder to build from 300,000 to the serious numbers like 1 or 2 million, which is the sweet spot for us. So this seemed like the best way to go,” stated Sarah Chubb, President of CondÃ©Net [Source: paidContent].

About a year ago, Flip hired Jane Grenier, a former Associate Publisher of Marketing for Teen Vogue to engage marketers into the site.Â CondÃ© Nast is the parent company of The New Yorker, Wired Magazine, GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Portfolio.com.

Users Aren’t Too Happy With Post-Acquisition Reddit

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:53:37 +0000

What has the alien done for its users lately? The users aren’t happy, that’s for sure. One of the stories that made it on the homepage today is:

Reddit has been taken over by US politics ^[1] and was posted by _simon_^[2], which was submitted roughly 8 hours ago.

I have Reddit plugged into my RSS feed aggregation homepage and I definitely agree. Whenever I check out the homepage RSS feeds, the stories mostly pertain to what is happening in the lives of George Bush and Dick Cheney. While this is very important to the nation and to us as a whole, it would be nice to see some news diversification. Diversification is one of Digg’s strengths, despite the fact that Google/Apple news tend to dominate the various technology industry homepages.

Further evidence that indicates the unhappiness of Reddit users include a story that was homepaged earlier today:
Should reddit go open source so that features get implemented^[3] and was submitted by Dreyus^[4]

Reading the commentary in both submitted articles is interesting. There seems to be an intense discussion in the open source posting between Reddit developers and users. Below is a screen shot example:

While I do not know much about the evolution of Reddit from history to acquisition to its present state so I may be jumping the gun in pointing out the opinion of Reddit users, I definitely think that reading the comments from the users is an indication of what has been happening since the acquisition of Reddit by CondÃ© Nast^[5].

[1] Reddit news posting
[2] Reddit user: _simon_
[3] Reddit news posting
[4] Reddit user: Dreyfu
[5] TechCrunch: Breaking News: CondÃ© Nast/Wired Acquires Reddit