Conde Nast's Flip Goes Flop: Closing Its Teen Social Network
This story was written by Rafat Ali.
When news came out that Conde Nast was launching its teen social media site Flip.com, back in 2006, Staci had a very pertinent question: "Can Conde Nast, which has been so good at matching demographics with ideas for print, create an online place appealing enough to catch and keep teen girls attention among so much competition?" Now as it has announced that it is closing Flip.com, the answer seems to be, unfortunately, no. The site will close down on Dec 16th, according to a note sent out to users, reported by FishbowlNY. "If you have any flipbooks that you would like to save before this date, we suggest you print them. It's easy; go to the flipbook and click on the Print button just below it." How convinient
Just a few months after the site's beta launch early last year, the company tied to retool it, and make it more about partnerships and working through other social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Even that didn't seem to have worked. Part of it has been its own internal bungling and key employee defection. Then, it didn't have a big traffic funnel to bring any kind of mass to the social net, and if anything, the key in such an effort is the network effect.
By Rafat Ali