Just ask Conde Nast.
A little more than a year ago, the magazine empire set about the task of building a social network for teen girls called Flip.com.
With an audience of millions already tapped into Teen Vogue and with deep corporate pockets supporting the effort, you would think that Conde Nast might have an easier task than most in growing a social network to critical mass.
Furthermore, by most accounts, Flip.com was a pretty a pretty good product. Pete Cashmore, who has seen more than his share of these sorts of sites, called it "Social Networking Perfection." Said Pete:
We expected Flip.com to rock, and it does - it’s one of the best new launches this year. In fact, there are only a few social networks we’ve reviewed in the past few months that are truly amazing, and Flip.com is certainly among them
Yet here we are, one year later, and Conde Nast is now shifting gears to focus primarily on the platforms of Facebook and MySpace. Says Silicon Alley Insider:
Just over a year after launching a girls' social networking site to compete with Facebook, CondeNet's Flip.com is joining it: In January Conde Nast's digital unit began powering down the original site and concentrating on an app that will work on Facebook and other social nets, and today it's launched it.
What happened? It's hard to say. Flip.com's traffic graph shows all the signs of an artificially supported (CPC, cross promotion) marketing campaign that was abruptly cut off.
Maybe the product wasn't good enough (or spammy enough), maybe they were too late, maybe it was poor execution, or who knows.... just maybe Flip.com the destination site failed because it is immensely, impossibly difficult to build a destination site without spamming the crap out of people if you did not launch before 2006.
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