Business

Condé Nast is making customers very app-y

Consumers may start seeing more free downloads of tablet editions from Condé Nast magazines — at least as temporary traffic builders.

Industry watchers were wondering what was up last week following the appearance of a free May issue of Wired magazine underwritten by Adobe. It comes after a full year of offering paid editions of Condé Nast’s trend-setting tech magazine.

And it turns out the idea of more free downloads was kicked around yesterday morning at a meeting that included Scott Dadich, vice president of digital development at Condé Nast, Tom Wallace, editorial director of the company, and the design and creative directors of the magazines who are intimately involved with app development.

They were holding what are expected to be monthly town hall meetings. Yesterday, Glamour, Vanity Fair and Golf Digest presented their experiences in the app world to their colleagues.

To be sure, those assembled at the meeting, while focused on how their magazine apps will work, are not the people who make the decisions about whether to charge or not.

While some media companies have eased off on the idea that paid issues will save publishing, most still think paid is the way to go.

Condé Nast hasn’t abandoned the paid downloads, but yesterday was the first sign that there may be at least one line of alternative thinking in the company about the notion of free.

GQ debuted its 2.0 version of an app yesterday and was still charging $4.99.

Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, and the author of the 2009 book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” pushed the theory in that book that digital development puts relentless downward pressure on content pricing and that some other model needed to be invented. Of course, there is no telling if his philosophy changed with the dawn of the iPad and the parent company’s embrace of paid editions. He was en route from Europe yesterday and could not be reached.

Wired was the first magazine with an app last June and its success helped propel Dadich from the San Francisco offices of Wired, where he developed the app, to the corporate headquarters back East in charge of all app developments for the company.

Condé Nast was happy to tout that Wired readers had downloaded more than 105,000 paid editions for the first issue last June — which was more than the 80,000-plus people who were buying the magazine at newsstands each month.

It looked extremely promising since there was no shipping or printing costs and — aside from the 30 percent cut of revenue that goes to Apple — a lot more of the money ended up in the publisher’s pocket than it did when all the handlers took a cut from the printed product.

But the app traffic fell off dramatically with the second issue, even though Condé shaved $1 off the price for subsequent downloads. Wired reported tablet downloads averaged 27,369 for the six months ended Dec. 31, 2010, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. That translates into a little over a $100,000 per month. Clearly better to have it than not, but it isn’t paying for much content on its own.

Still, Wired Publisher Howard Mittman said the current Adobe-sponsored free app for May was a one- off.

“This sponsorship is not indicative of any changes in our consumer marketing strategies and single-copy prices will return to normal in June,” he said.

That price is back to $3.99 an issue next month. So don’t delay, get yours today.

Adweek add

As expected, Prometheus Media folded its MediaWeek and Brandweek publications into the newly redesigned Adweek that debuted on Monday.

The much-vaunted Adweek Hot List, which was introduced by the late Clay Fleker in the mid-1980s, used to appear in the first quarter of the year. When it missed its traditional appearance date, there was a lot of buzz that it was gone for good.

But Michael Wolff, the editor-in-chief, e-mailed to insist a version of the Hot List will be appearing next week, which is about a month or more later than normal.

The redesign received gener ally favorable coverage, aside from the embar rassment of a misspell ing smack dab on the cover.

The name of social- gaming company Zynga — which was misspelled “Zenga” — was first pointed out by Mediabistro yesterday, inspiring a little back and forth on Twitter yesterday.

“@Adweek, so were you thinking about the game or the suit?” said a post from Zynga, referring to a Hasbro game called Jenga and Ermenegildo Zenga suits. “Pick one,” it admonished.

AdWeek tweeted back “Can’t chat right now. Doing a little Zen Buddhist painting and calligraphy,” and it linked to a Wikipedia entry about the Japanese practice of Zenga.

kkelly@nypost.com