Condé Nast has been investigating how readers are taking to the iPad and, if nothing else, the iPad seems a little less mysterious now. Normal people are reading Condé Nast titles on the device — not just (what The New Yorker’s Ben McGrath might call) gadget fetishists or Apple fanatics. The most exciting nugget from the recent fact-finding mission is that readers are spending more time with Condé titles on the iPad than they would in print.
This last point needs an asterisks. Apple was not actually able (willing?) to segment the amount of time readers spent in a given app by issue, according to David Kaplan at PaidContent who reported the survey last night. Condé was only able to learn that readers were spending more time with the GQ app on the iPad but not, for example, a specific month’s issue of GQ. The research involved more than 100 hours of one-on-one interviews and 5,000 surveys through Condé apps.
In other news, the iPad is not a mobile device (semantics!). Also it’s a lean-back device (ex: your favorite broadsheet, a pipe) and not a lean-forward device (Shine, Yahoo’s site for women).
Today there is also talk of an imminent reorganization at Condé Nast’s digital business side following the arrival of Joe Simon as chief technology officer earlier this summer, according to the New York Post and Paid Content. Mr. Simon will take a larger role in deciding the company’s digital strategy.
Lou Cona, the chief marketing officer, will also see increased control of the company’s digital strategy. Mr. Cona’s division oversees bundled ad sales in print and now he will handle bundled ad sales online. The publisher is abandoning the idea of bundling different brands into online sites like Epicurious.com and Style.com under the CondeNet umbrella. Maybe one-stop shopping for space on Condé’s different online properties through Mr. Cona’s team will be more attractive to advertisers. No jobs are going to be lost in the shuffle.
