Condé Nast Shutters Three Blogs You've Never Heard Of

(MoneyWatch)  If a blog falls in a forest, but no one is there to read it, does it make a sound? That was the first thought that came to my mind when reading this story from Mediaweek about the demise of three Condé Nast blogs: Product Fiend, Elastic Waist and Daily Bedpost -- devoted to skincare, weight management issues and sex, respectively.

Never heard of this tidy little blog network? I hadn't either, and few people knowing about them was the problem. Condé Nast didn't cough up traffic figures to Mediaweek -- at least before its deadline -- but the story did say this:

... a company source with access to the numbers said Bedpost's traffic was around 100,000 unique monthly users. ComScore said the sites didn't meet its minimum reporting threshold of 100,000 unique visitors per month.

Apparently even the one about sex didn't sell. I checked these blogs out only after they'd been killed off, trying to answer the question of why online media properties produced by one of the biggest magazine groups in the world didn't gain traction. There's really no smoking gun, except that they are no different than hundreds of other blogs. All three of the shuttered Condé Nast blogs adhere to conversational, blogger-ly style. All also broadened their brands beyond their blogs, posting videos to YouTube, managing Facebook groups and so forth. The people who ran them were very schooled in the latest social media tools. But no matter.

You could speculate that when these blogs first launched in the fall of 2007, Condé Nast saw the cheap production and distribution costs of blogging, and figured that for ventures it backed, it could build audience relatively easily, perhaps launching the Next Big Thing in the process. Maybe there were dreams of one of them even becoming a magazine. Now, the company has probably found that because cheap production and distribution is cheap for everybody, having a big media company behind a blogging venture matters less and less.