about  /   archives  /   contact  /   subscribe  /   twitter    
Share this entry
Make this entry better

What are we missing? Is there a key link we skipped, or a part of the story we got wrong?

Let us know — we’re counting on you to help Encyclo get better.

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

Key links:
Primary website:
condenast.com

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

Conde Nast is an international magazine publisher that specializes in lifestyle publications.

Conde Nast publishes many of the world’s leading fashion and lifestyle magazines, including Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair, and GQ. It also publishes The New Yorker and Wired and owns the tech blog Ars Technica and the link-sharing site Reddit. It launched a fashion school in London in 2013. Conde Nast sold a group of publications under the division Fairchild Fashion Media to Penske Media for $100 million in 2014, 15 years after it bought Fairchild from Disney for $650 million.

Owned since 1959 by the Newhouse family’s Advance Publications and chaired by S.I. “Si” Newhouse Jr., Conde Nast has been known for several decades as one of the United States’ more glamorous and free-spending publishing empires. Its profits typically have been low, though, because of its lavish spending and consistent investment in new titles.

Still, the company has made significant cuts and layoffs since 2008 as a result of declining advertising and profit. In 2009, it closed several magazines including Portfolio (whose website was kept alive by another Advance subsidiary), Domino, and Modern Bride.

It also closed the 68-year-old food magazine Gourmet, though in 2010 the magazine was reintroduced in an iPad version.

Since the early 2000s, Conde Nast’s advertising department has designed and developed advertising campaigns, similar to a full-fledged ad agency. It expanded into digital-only ads in 2010 and multimedia, social media and apps in 2011.

Conde Nast began its first websites in the mid-1990s. The company’s digital operations had long been run by CondeNet, which was turned into Conde Nast Digital in 2009 as all of its digital properties were merged into one unit. Until the late 2000s, the company placed relatively little emphasis on digital media: As of 2008, only about 3 percent of its ad revenue came from digital properties, among the lowest totals in the industry.

Conde Nast’s most visited websites are RedditWired, and Epicurious.

Conde Nast announced an advertising and content-sharing partnership with the video site Hulu in 2009. It announced a partnership with Amazon in 2013 that allowed Amazon to manage subscriptions for its top titles and package them to Amazon subscribers.

The company launched its first mobile products in 2005 and gave its publications individual mobile sites in 2008. GQ was the first magazine to launch an iPhone app with a full replica of the magazine. Conde Nast developed its own reader platform for the app. The company also plans to incorporate Twitter and Facebook into its iPhone apps.

Conde Nast was among the first publishers to announce plans for iPad editions of its publications, starting with versions of Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Glamour. The Wired iPad app, at $4.95 an issue, quickly outsold the print edition in its early months, now averaging about a third of the print edition’s sales. In early 2011, Conde Nast raised the price on two of its tablet publications, GQ and Vanity Fair, to more closely align with newsstand pricing. In May 2011, it announced a new deal with Apple using its subscription model that would place several Conde Nast magazines in the App Store at $19.99 per year.

Conde Nast is also part of a consortium of magazine publishers, Next Issue Media, that released magazine subscriptions on Android-powered Samsung Galaxy tablets in May 2011 and a flat-rate subscription across magazines for the iPad in July 2012. Conde Nast was also one of the initial publishers to sign on with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Peers, allies, & competitors:
Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
Nov. 1, 2022 / Laura Hazard Owen
New York City now requires salary ranges in job posts. Here’s which media companies are complying, and which aren’t — Starting Tuesday, New York City employers are required by law to include “a good faith salary range” for every job they post. (“Good faith” means “the salary range the employer honestly beli...
May 24, 2022 / Sarah Scire
Condé Nast is “no longer a magazine company,” its CEO says — Condé Nast, publisher of glossy titles like Vogue, Wired, The New Yorker, and GQ, is “no longer a magazine company,” its CEO Roger Lynch said. “We have about 70 million people who read our magazines, but we ha...
Oct. 18, 2021 / Hanaa' Tameez
Travel writer Sarah Khan’s next destination is a top editing job in Dubai — and making travel media more inclusive — October has been a good month for Sarah Khan. Her essay “In the City of Saints” about Harar, Ethiopia was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2021. She also received an honorable mention from the Society of...
May 15, 2020 / Laura Hazard Owen and Sarah Scire
“Prior assumptions about our business no longer apply”: Cuts pile up at Vice, Quartz, The Economist, BuzzFeed, and Condé Nast — Hundreds of journalism jobs — primarily, though not exclusively, at digital media outlets — were cut this week, piling up alongside thousands of other media job losses that have accelerated during the COVID-19 pandem...
April 18, 2019 / Ken Doctor
Newsonomics: Bryan Goldberg wants to build Bustle into the “Meredith of the digital age” — Bryan Goldberg positions himself as a contrarian. While many media owners look to sell, he’s on the hunt for bargains — and he’s finding a few he believes in. While he was outbid by Great Hill Partners for ...

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: August 21, 2014.
Make this entry better
How could this entry improve? What's missing, unclear, or wrong?
Name (optional)
Email (optional)
Explore: BBC News
BBC News logo

BBC News is a British state-sponsored news organization and the world’s largest broadcast news operation. BBC News is a division of the BBC, or British Broadcasting Corp., the world’s largest media organization and oldest national public broadcaster. The BBC is funded largely by revenue from British television licenses. The BBC was reported in 2014 to…

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

Encyclo is made possible by a grant from the Knight Foundation.
The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.
Some rights reserved. Copyright information »