Glamour.com Grooms Weddings Channel Around Blogs

Condé Nast’s Glamour.com has enjoyed strong traffic growth in the past year, in part on the popularity of its blogs. Now, it’s launching a new one at the core of a new weddings channel.The idea for the new channel grew out of strong reader traffic and comments to weddings-related posts on the site, Glamour editor Cindi Leive said. “One of our top blog posts ever was a fun proposal story,” she said. “A lot of women want to read about this.”Condé Nast recently shut down two of its three bridal magazines, leaving just Brides. But Glamour believes its new online channel will address an underserved audience—women who may or may not be brides-to-be but are surrounded by weddings in any case. Leive is going for a different tone than Brides.com, Condé Nast’s wedding-planning portal.The channel is centered around a blog and carries the tagline “For brides (and the people who have to put up with them).” Said Leive: “As with the rest of Glamour.com, we think the heart and soul will be the funny, opinionated and passionate debate among the users.”With Glamour Weddings, Glamour.com hopes to maintain growth that’s made it the top-trafficked women’s magazine site by monthly uniques, per Nielsen and comScore, which had Glamour.com’s traffic at over 1.6 million uniques in October—ahead of other magazine sites like Elle.com and InStyle.com.With the weddings channel, Glamour.com isn’t just eyeing traffic growth. Drew Schutte, senior vp, chief revenue officer for Condé Nast Digital, said Glamour.com has been good at creating channels with multiple subtopics that make it easy for advertisers to target their ads, and the weddings channel is another such example. Schutte declined to release dollar figures, but said that Glamour.com has grown ad revenue 62 percent over 2008’s total.The channel hasn’t inked any sponsors yet. But Schutte said he saw the channel appealing to Glamour’s existing clients rather than to core bridal advertisers. “Those advertisers tend to stay very focused,” he said. “There might be some things we don’t traditionally see on Glamour.com, like liquor or champagne, but for the most part it’s increasing spending from existing brands.” As for Brides.com, Condé Nast is preparing to relaunch it in the first half of 2010 with more local content, Schutte said. The channel’s light-hearted approach led Audrey Siegel, executive vp, TargetCast, to question the channel’s consumer and advertiser need. “It’s surprising that Glamour would enter into that space in that they’re not a bridal destination,” she said. But she added, “They have a strong name and good history with readers. If they craft a good offering, I’d be happy to be proven wrong.”

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Glamour.com Grooms Weddings Channel Around Blogs

Lucia Moses

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