Condé Nast expands mobile reach to boost advertising

by Sarah Crawley-Boevey, Media Week 04-Mar-08, 11:30

LONDON - CondéNet UK, the digital arm of magazine publisher Condé Nast, is to take its mobile sites off-portal, thus making the services available to a wider potential audience.

From this Thursday, GQ Mobile and Glamour Mobile will be the first to go exclusively off-portal, which means that instead of accessing the sites via their mobile phone networks’ portals, users will be able to access them via the open internet. There are also plans to roll out Vogue Mobile off-portal. Currently, the sites are only available via Vodafone Live and O2 Active.

The company has teamed up with technology provider Wapfly, which will ensure the sites’ content is correctly formatted for every provider.

Charlotte Duck, mobile editor at CondéNet, said the move would allow the company to sell advertising on the mobile sites for the first time and would enable it to market the sites online and in print.

“When we were on-portal the [mobile phone] networks controlled the ad side of things, and sometimes the editorial content, but now we own the sites we can sell pages to our own clients and cut out the middle man,” she said.

Duck said her team had been looking at going off-portal for “a long time”, but had not made the move while networks charged a premium for off-portal browsing. Now those prices have fallen, she believes many rivals will follow suit.

While some companies offer their mobile sites both on and off-portal, Condé¬Net plans to offer all its mobile sites off-portal by the end of the year.

Duck added that the move would bring more benefits than drawbacks. She said: “It’s a disadvantage in some ways because Vodafone Live and O2 Active get a lot of passing traffic, but we couldn’t market our own sites or tell people how to find it because the access was different on each network, and not available on some.”