Brooks in Beta

What did Condé Nast learn from the Web?

Somehow I missed this Ad Age story on Friday about Condé Nast slowing down its rollout of iPad apps. With 8 already launched, the higher-ups don’t feel as if the medium is mature enough to handle the kind of scale that advertisers are looking for. Simply put: The apps aren’t making enough money (if any at all).

This sounds like an entirely sensible idea. They’ve made 8 of these things. They’re not as popular as they had hoped, so they’re slowing things down to reevaluate their strategy. The real question is if internally they believe this is a referendum on the technology or its application. Thankfully, for innovation’s sake, the president of Condé hinted it was the latter.

“They [the publishers] don’t want to go the way of the web again,” Bob Sauerber said.

Smart. Wait … What does he mean by that?

Does he mean they don’t want to simply repurpose print content in another medium? Does he mean that they don’t want to just create brochure-ware for their magazines? Does he mean the publishers don’t want to be restricted again from selling ads against their own digital products (which was the case until last year)? Any of these would indicate Condé was going the “way of the web again.”

It doesn’t appear Sauerber was referring to any of that. Nat Ives suggests, by way of an “insider,” that what what the CN president means is that “the company doesn’t want to invest significantly more time and resources in the platform if the ground isn’t sufficiently fertile yet for a broad swath of readers and the advertisers that need big reach.”

Oh, right, that’s it. Not enough people are downloading the apps to make it a viable advertising vehicle. Well if that’s the case, then yes, I agree with the publishers. Don’t make the same mistake you did with the Web—don’t assume that the print business model applies. Maybe you figure out how to leverage your talents in the new medium and sell a product that people would be willing to pay for (or that more people would be willing to download like Gourmet Live, which I thought has been a success). Maybe you create a magazine app publishing tool that you can license to other magazine publishers who would be happy to pay you so they won’t have to pay to reinvent the wheel. If nothing else, this means looking beyond repurposing your magazine content. It didn’t work on the Web and it won’t work as an app (until you reach that tipping point of readers you reference).

P.S. The one person missing from the Ad Age article is Scott Dadich. Remember him? He was brought in last August to oversee the production of apps. I wonder what he thinks about all of this.