'Conde Nast Portfolio' Was Never a Great Idea
With the closing today of Condé Nast Portfolio, it's worth taking a moment to question whether the magazine -- even if it will be officially classified as a victim of the recession -- was ever a good idea in the first place.
Check out this description of what the magazine promised to deliver from Amazon, and tell me whether other business magazines couldn't claim the same thing:
Condé Nast Portfolio is a publication that sees business differently. We see it as powerful, gutsy, counterintuitive, and passionate. We see fascinating stories of ambition, invention, ego, drama, and conflict. We see how business echoes throughout society, in culture and in politics. We see an engaged audience of executives very much on the same page.You mean that Forbes, Fortune and BusinessWeek don't have similar missions? Maybe Portfolio was a bit glossier, but in a fragmented media landscape, it was nigh impossible for the magazine's fairly subtle differences from the rest of the pack to stand out to consumers or advertisers. All business books are having their travails, but to give greater insight, I looked at a breakout of Publishers Information Bureau ad pages and ad revenue data for the first quarter. It's painfully clear there was no market, especially now, for a fourth major U.S. business magazine. (Still looking for a good source on circulation data.)
Mind you, it's not that it's a good time to be in the business magazine business, but clearly, Portfolio was an idea whose time has come and gone, if it ever should have come in the first place. Even looking at last year, before its ad revenue dropped off a cliff, it's actually shocking to see how it was dwarfed by its competition. Even if the other magazines benefit from greater frequency, I never imagined that Portfolio only had a tiny fraction of the revenue of the no. 3 book, Forbes. A few months ago, someone who should know speculated to me that things at Condé Nast would be way different if it hadn't been for the corporate brass' steadfast commitment to Portfolio. Even as many of its other magazines struggle, I imagine that among most of the Condé Nast rank-and-file, the closing of Portfolio is bringing a sigh of relief. It needed to die so that others could live.