NASTIE HOLLYWOOD
Condé Entertainment $cores as mag revs sag
In the midst of a huge downturn in print advertising, the Big Media bet by Condé Nast, the 115-year-old magazine publisher, is starting to bear fruit.
Condé Nast Entertainment, run by Dawn Ostroff, finished 2016 with at least a $1 million profit, an Oscar nomination and more traffic to its digital content than ESPN or BuzzFeed.
“Our division became profitable [relatively quickly],” Ostroff told The Post. “We had the pressure of scaling and monetizing at the same time — we didn’t have the luxury of some start-ups to scale and then monetize.”
As with most print media today, Condé Nast Chief Executive Bob Sauerberg is under intense pressure to both diversify and cut costs.
North American magazine spending will fall 3 percent in 2017, to $22.35 billion, from 2016, after falling 2 percent from 2015, according to industry tracker GroupM.
Enter Ostroff, who is tasked with steering the glam mag name toward film and digital content — the sweet spot for media, where non-search ad spending is expected to expanded by 20 percent, to $21.7 billion, from 2015.
Ostroff, 56, known for having her finger on the pulse of what young people would watch fielded hits such as “Gossip Girl” and “America’s Next Top Model,” as entertainment president at The CW.
She was wooed to Condé in 2011 with the long-shot mission of taking magazine stories and turning them into digital and box office dough.
She had few believers in those days, she remembers, with some industry insiders citing the failure of Talk magazine, the grand experiment from Tina Brown, Harvey Weinstein and Hearst, which had the same idea in 1999 but crashed and burned three years later.
But as the division started to show increased traffic and ad revenue, many top magazine editors got on board and sought her support. Ostroff helped launch 19 digital video channels, most of which were based on mag concepts.
At Vogue.com, for example, readers can find video of Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour discussing the trends of New York Fashion Week.
Content from the firm’s magazines — and CNE original content — have generated 1.2 billion views on YouTube. It also is distributed on such big names as Facebook, Snapchat and Yahoo.
ComScore ranks CNE the No. 21 most-popular digital media property — ahead of ESPN, Pinterest, BuzzFeed and Vice — as of Dec. 16.
“Go out to where the consumer is, as opposed to expecting the consumer to come to you,” Ostroff cites, as if her mantra.
The entertainment division is still small, however, and its profit isn’t able to keep the company from having to make deep budget cuts.
With the Academy Awards on next Sunday, Ostroff is hoping its single nominee, “Joe’s Violin,” a documentary short that is based on a New Yorker story about a Holocaust survivor who donated his violin to a schoolgirl, will come home a winner.
Elsewhere, she’s working with Robert Redford and Casey Affleck on a movie, “Old Man and the Gun,” while “Granite Mountain,” about fighting an Arizona wildfire, based on a GQ story, starring Josh Brolin, Jennifer Connelly and Jeff Bridges, is slated for theaters in September.