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Condé Nast to mobilise UK portfolio

Condé Nast has outlined plans to heavily invest in mobile websites this year.

Approximately 10% of the publisher’s UK readers currently access its online properties via mobile devices. Vogue.co.uk, which has 1.5 million monthly visitors, is the only UK Condé Nast site which is optimised for mobile and saw a spike in its traffic when the mobile site was released.

“We’ve been playing lip service to the optimisation of our websites for mobile for quite some time, but I’m delighted to say we are now putting our money very firmly where our mouth is,” says Condé Nast digital UK director Jamie Jouning.

Mobile optimised sites for the UK editions of Wired, Glamour and GQ are currently in the pipeline. Condé Nast will be building the sites in-house in an effort to keep brand continuity and managing the projects in-house is expected to increase the unspecified cost of the developments.

“Officially, we’re no longer in the desktop era. We’re in the mobile era,” says Wired editor David Rowan. “People connecting to the network wherever they are is going to be the future for publishing organisations like ours.”

Despite Condé Nast’s push into mobile, print is still a priority for the publisher. A cross platform user study on its publications carried out by Ipsos MediaCT found that many of its readers consider print copies of magazines as luxury items and consume the content at a slower pace.

“Magazines are proving to be immensely resilient. I remember going to a conference 10 years ago where somebody predicted that by now, magazine sales would have halved. But they haven’t halved at all. Many of our magazine sales are increasing, to heights that we never envisaged,” says Condé Nast International president Nicholas Coleridge.

David Hing, London