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How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

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Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#31

Post by CountHackulus »

gs17 wrote: post #5
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?

There's web-based readers that work in Chrome. After Google Reader died, I moved to Feedly which seems to still work alright.

There's also TheOldReader which is the same UI as Google Reader and works great.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#32

Post by teh_infallible »

whynotminot wrote: post #21
rsingel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Ars used to have interesting articles about novel intersections between technology and the law. Now it’s like a Sharper Image catalogue.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#33

Post by skeeter2020 »

omar_alt wrote: post #3

At the time this was declared as a user base driven acquisition where Conde Nast assumed that the largely 20 to mid 30s male readership of Pitchfork would graduate to one of their traditional style publications once they came of age. Clearly it was misguided to assume that cash strapped college grads who grew up on mp3's and ramen would graduate to Eames chairs and Zegna fleeces without some VC backed lottery payout.

great TL;DR

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#34

Post by Spivak »

xbar wrote: post #23
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.

Spotify's algo for discover weekly can be incredible but you have to give it a fuckton of data to work with. My liked songs is >8k I follow probably 1000 artists (the UI doesn't give me a count).

It will surface bands with For small sample sizes Pandora is still king.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#35

Post by CodeWriter23 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #25
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It’ll last as long as it does then there will be nothing but crap.

Perhaps that is closer than we think

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#36

Post by ghaff »

AlbertCory wrote: post #28
gkanai wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Zagat was pretty small potatoes. It sorta made sense at a time when foodies was sort of an artisanal thing. Not sure Google even lost out on the buy.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#37

Post by mjmsmith »

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.

Vindigo with Zagat was peak mobile internet. It's been downhill since 2002.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#38

Post by smcin »

AlbertCory wrote: post #29
smcin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The oxygen was pretty rarefied in 1999-2001. Maybe they used nitrous.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#39

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

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.

Syfy makes it airs the occasionally great original content. Everything else, is and has been, junk filler on repeat for over two decades.

Re: How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork

#40

Post by AlbertCory »

ghaff wrote: post #36
AlbertCory wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Zagat was pretty small potatoes. It sorta made sense at a time when foodies was sort of an artisanal thing. Not sure Google even lost out on the buy.

This was 2011. Foodies were well past artisanal by then.

As for Google: 'splain me why it wasn't just $150M down the drain? Minus the undisclosed amount:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagat

On March 6, 2018, Google sold the company to restaurant discovery platform The Infatuation for an undisclosed amount

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