Flip Fails. Condé Nast Reverses Strategy.
Michael Arrington
18 comments »
If you can’t beat ‘em, turn into a widget and join ‘em.
Condé Nast is changing strategies on Flip, its young-teen women social network that launched last February. They announced today that Flip will be “reshaped as a flexible web application designed to live on social networking platform, starting with Facebook.”
Translation: “We give up.” Comscore says Flip has dropped to around 100,000 monthly visitors from a high of half a million in May (see chart). Facebook has, by comparison, 100 million worldwide monthly visitors, or about 1,000 times the audience.
Condé Nast says that they’ll continue to operate the Flip.com website, but development and marketing efforts will shift to distributed applications.
So Flip turns, essentially, into one of thousands of Facebook applications. To date, the Flip application on Facebook has nine daily active users. This smells like deadpool to me.
Another deadpool! Too bad!
Facebook has 100 million users?
Just yesterday, Ouriel Ohayon wrote on TC that it’s “really easy to fact check that Facebook does not have close to a hundred million users”.
Someone in your office is not doing his/her fact-checking!
I like flip. I have been using flip for two years.
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Deadpool indeed. Its very hard to find space in a crowded market unless you come up with a killer app.
I read that they had 18 employees for Flip alone. What the heck were 18 people doing day to day for work on it? Sounds like poor management…the product itself is actually pretty cool
http://www.leveragingideas.com
At least they know when to say when, instead of throwing good money after bad.
It’s a waste of a perfectly fine domain name, though.
Anyone know what caused the steep descent after hitting their peak? Likely they had a runway to spend on SEM or distribution through Conde that expired and the site couldn’t sustain itself without it, but just interested if there is another culprit.
I guess this was a Flip flop.
18 people work on flip because it is pretty complicated to deliver that functionality we did. Anyone who writes something like that never build a flip.com.
Looks interesting. Evolve or die.
I like it
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“Facebook has 100 million users?
Just yesterday, Ouriel Ohayon wrote on TC that it’s “really easy to fact check that Facebook does not have close to a hundred million users”.
Someone in your office is not doing his/her fact-checking!”
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100 million Monthly Visitors! not 100 million users.
Oh 100 million monthly visits.
It failed to stand out in a market with dozens of competitors (social networks), so it’s gone into a market with thousands of competitors (social network apps). Fail. Sorry, I know that word’s overused - but then, the damage is already done, so here it is again. Fail. Fail fail fail fail fail. What’s that coming over the hill? Is it fail? Yes.
They might be planning to beat Piczo!
I’m not sure I really agree with idea that it’s a good move for all businesses to abandon niche social network building. I’d say that Conde’ Nast’s “niche” market was actually too big a market segment to succeed. Long tail niche sites that I’ve seen be successful tend to target seemingly smaller communities, ones that are only large in internet aggregate rather than in initial market segmentation. (Young girls in the US alone is probably a 5-15 million person market segment) Successful niche social networks need more cohesive culture & connection than a target audience that size is likely to have.
If anything I’d think niche community sites haven’t yet been fully realized, Conde Nast’s strategy was perhaps unsuccessful due to their unwillingness to truly embrace a niche, a desire to homogenize a group that is too diverse and vast to banner together under one site such as flip. I’d say that Conde Nast’s new strategy of trying to leverage “other” social networking sites proves the point that their real problem was in identifying their niche, rather than with the strategy, as they’re hoping to tap into their demographic in each larger pool, which in some sense is a continuation of their original strategy of market segmentation with the added twist of recognizing that they are targeting too broad a group to offer them a single message or service that unifies or compels the whole audience. I.E. their long tail is their group within each larger group. I’d imagine they still won’t see much success without really chopping up their focus into even tighter, more unified market segments though.
I think rather than the day of the niche social network being over, it’s a sign that big companies who are trying to market to large, unfocused market segments can’t build cost effective social networks, which leaves an opportunity for smaller companies to create effective, focused networks. Businesses that do have a more easily identifiable, more cohesive audience would be a good fit for targeted social networks, and there is still a large desire for content publishing and sharing functionality that lives behind a user defined private fence. The trick here is all in the targeting, and all on the ROI you can expect from actually reaching your exact audience.