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How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

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Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#21

Post by whynotminot »

rsingel wrote: post #19
sybercecurity wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partially, but can't go back in time and prove otherwise. When Conde Nast started buying up specialty like Bicycling, Outdoors, and Wired they transformed them into generic "lifestyle" magazines (10-15 years ago). I remember flipping through Bicycling and seeing 3 car advertisements before getting to the first that had anything to do with cycling and all the columns and editorials contained product pitches for person…

Conde Nast has never bought specialty mags, and doesn't own Outdoors or Bicycling. It bought Wired mag (but not the online site) in like 1998. The closest Conde Nast has now to a specialist site is Ars Technica, which it bought almost 20 years ago

And Ars is still great!

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#22

Post by itsoktocry »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

This is like blaming the stock market going up or down on the president. Conde Nast may have simply been the last one holding the "hot potato". In the face of social media platforms sucking the userbase away from blogs and traditional websites, can you really blame them? Does Chrome even have a way to follow RSS feeds, or do you need to install a shady plugin?

Exactly. We always tend to blame the purchaser, but why not the seller? If their business was good and they cared about the product, why sell? And if the business was bad, can't blame they buyer, either.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#23

Post by xbar »

nemo44x wrote: post #11

> But she also faced pressure to cut costs as traffic from social media platforms declined and Spotify’s algorithms siphoned off more casual fans who’d used Pitchfork for music discovery. This is pretty much it. There’s no need for arbitrary tastemakers now. What’s good can emerge from what similar listeners happen to like right now. It takes even less effort for users as well and probably gives better results.

My small-sample research into Spotify user satisfaction with new music discovery is that it is a mixed bag. I have not tried it, but the common Spotify dissatisfaction was enough for several of us to investigate novel new music discovery ideas. Nothing forthcoming.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#24

Post by ubermonkey »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #7

Condé Nast is where awesome goes to die.

Every year they don't ruin the New Yorker, I breathe a sigh of relief.

Granted, Si Newhouse bought it in 1985 - the only time the magazine's ownership changed! - and so maybe it enjoys a sort of grandfathered status at Conde Nast even with Newhouse dead?

I mean, I say that, but they recently ruined the previously-excellent iPad app, which has resulted in me going back to paper issues, but if that's the extent of the tomfoolery I'll take it.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#25

Post by itsoktocry »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #15
egberts1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Ars Technica is getting stale.

They still have a couple of decent writers. But CN’s business model is buy publications with lots of eyeballs and increase the revenue per eyeball while decreasing the total number of eyeballs per publication but firm-wide across all properties eyeballs are on an upward trajectory. It’ll last as long as it does then there will be nothing but crap. Like SciFi turning into the wrestling channel at scale.

>But CN’s business model is buy publications with lots of eyeballs and increase the revenue per eyeball while decreasing the total number of eyeballs per publication but firm-wide across all properties eyeballs are on an upward trajectory

According to Wikipedia, their last acquisition was Pitchfork in 2015. That's almost 10 years ago. Prior to that, the last popular property appears to be Ars in 2008 and reddit, in 2006. They don't actually seem to be buying many properties...

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#27

Post by StopTheTechies »

TBH, Condé Nast can only be blamed for a small part of Pitchfork's fall. They've always been wildly inconsistent in their ratings and beholden to a few darling artists, and none of the acquisitions have improved this. Over time they've lost mostly to influencers.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#28

Post by AlbertCory »

gkanai wrote: post #17
AlbertCory wrote: post #12

This reminds me of Google under Marissa Mayer buying Zagat. Remember them? Big company buys small company, dismembers it into little pieces controlled by managers who weren't fans of the acquisition and don't respect it -- it's an old story. The founder of the acquiree quits in frustration, etc. etc.

The Zagats were paid $150M for their business. Whatever frustration they may have is cushioned by that payout.

That's them. For Conde, wasted money. As with Google.

As for Zagat, Tim told us he wanted a secure job for his people after he was gone. The jury is out on that one.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#29

Post by AlbertCory »

smcin wrote: post #20
AlbertCory wrote: post #12

This reminds me of Google under Marissa Mayer buying Zagat. Remember them? Big company buys small company, dismembers it into little pieces controlled by managers who weren't fans of the acquisition and don't respect it -- it's an old story. The founder of the acquiree quits in frustration, etc. etc.

There's a difference between buying a media property to try to sell more content(/advertising) into its subscriberbase(/userbase), vs keeping it as a going concern. Or sometimes, companies acquire into newer markets to try to boost their valuations based on P/E ratio. AOL-Time-Warner (1998) and then AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape (2001) spring to mind. Although those were all pre-Enron, pre-SarbOx valuations.

That's what they say in the C suite anyway.
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