This passage which talks about magazines’ fate and Conde Nast in particular explains why WatchMojo produces videos the way it does, at an atomic level, by trying to have an entertaining and informative video for every category, sub-category, title, tag and keyword imaginable:
Just as other media have been disaggregated – the atomic unit is no longer the album but the song, the equivalent in news was the publication or the section or the article and now is the post – so is the essential element of the magazine no longer the publication but now the article, at least for now. So what separates a magazine article now from a newspaper article or a blog post except, perhaps, length (and online, length is often seen as a liability)?
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WatchMojo NewsletterEric Schmidt dreams of building a $100 billion company at Google. It’s not crazy. The company does over $20B in revenues now and units like YouTube had not cracked the nut yet.
Two old posts:
- Google’s market will surpass MSFT by 2010 (in hindsight pretty impossible to happen in 2010, but not out of the question) - read post here.
- Will Google be the world’s first trillion dollar company? Read post here.
Have you ever been faced with a specific problem and asked yourself: “I wonder if there is a solution out there”. Well today is your lucky day!
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This is sad. Conde Nast is one of the finer magazine and media companies… but I guess no one is immune to the realities of the macro (economy) and micro (print) economies.
Conde Nast is shutting down a bunch of magazines:
Conde Nast told shocked staff today it was closing Gourmet magazine, Cookie, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride, surpassing expectations of perhaps one or two shutdowns as a result of McKinsey’s analysis.
The shutdown of titles across the Conde Nast portfolio this morning demonstrated, even more than arrival of the McKinsey consultants hired to deflate the company’s massive spending, that the polish was off the luxury publisher.
Here is the full company memo:
Read the staff memo from Mr. Townsend:
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 10:16:52
To: Conde Nast Publications-All
Conversation: Announcing Changes within Condé Nast
Subject: Announcing Changes within Condé Nast
We have now completed an extensive review of our business — an important undertaking given the dramatic changes in the U.S. economy. The review has led us to a number of decisions designed to navigate the company through the economic downturn and to position us to take advantage of coming opportunities.Conde Nast’s success comes from the ability of our publications to attract readers with a wide range of interests, as well as advertisers who value them. But in this economic climate it is important to narrow our focus to titles with the greatest prospects for long-term growth.
As a result of our review, Brides will increase its frequency to monthly to solidify its position as the most important brand in the bridal category, and Modern Bride and Elegant Bride will close.
Gourmet magazine will cease monthly publication, but we will remain committed to the brand, retaining Gourmet’s book publishing and television programming, and Gourmet recipes on Epicurious.com. We will concentrate our publishing activities in the epicurean category on Bon Appétit.
Finally, Cookie magazine will be discontinued, and resources that had been dedicated to its publishing will be invested elsewhere.
The editorial and business staffs of Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, Gourmet, and Cookie all have earned their magazines large and devoted followings. We have been proud to publish these titles, and we are grateful to the staffs for their hard work and dedication.
These changes, combined with cost and workforce reductions now underway throughout the company, will speed the recovery of our current businesses and enable us to pursue new ventures. In the coming weeks, we hope to announce initiatives to develop digital versions of our brands that will make use of new devices and distribution channels.
From the department of “no shit”:
A number of the large ad networks have been reaching out to developers to let them know that they essentially have no idea what’s going on. Facebook has taken the latest actions without giving developers any form of early notification and many ad networks feel left in the dark. Those developers that have ad supported business models (the majority of Facebook developers) feel as though their businesses are in jeopardy. The rationale is that if they can’t trust what were previously reliable ad networks, who can they trust?
The developers all share a legitimate concern. One developer I spoke with postulated that if you can’t rely on the ad networks, is Facebook a good platform for running a business?
I don’t mean to sound holier than thou here, after all, we derive 49.5% of our total streams from YouTube, but YouTube owns 75% of the video content space (ie. so we don’t have a choice). However, to hedge against this, we generate less than 5% of our revenues from YouTube and maybe 10% from Google/YouTube combined.
