J
im Spanfeller, former CEO of Forbes.com, is unveiling a new Web foodie site that he hopes will digest at least $20 million in revenue within three years.
If he is successful with the new venture, which is launching from the fledgling Spanfeller Media Group, it will put him in a food fight with Condé Nast’s Gourmet Live and catapult him to the top of the food category, ahead of Reader’s Digest’s Allrecipes, FoodNetwork.com and others.
Of course, he hasn’t even signed his editor-in-chief or named his site yet.
As All Things Digital first reported yesterday, he is close to getting backing from Huffington Post angel Ken Lerer through the Lerer Fund, Softbank, RRE Ventures and Greenhill & Co.’s Silicon Alley Venture Partners and hopes to kick it off with about $2 million in the bank.
Spanfeller spelled out a few more details of his latest venture in an exclusive interview with Media Ink.
“Softbank is the lead investor,” he said. He confirmed that the plan is to launch vertical sites covering very specific categories. While steering clear of his past experience in business/finance, he’s also avoiding sports, technology and entertainment on the grounds that there are already too many competitors.
“There is a lot of interest in food, which is why we are doing it first, but in terms of really big soup-to-nuts food sites, there is no really big player out there,” he said.
According to comScore, the top food Web site in May was Allrecipes.com, which garnered 10.2 million unique visitors in May, followed by Cooks.com (8.9 million), Foodnetwork.com (7.5 million); Gourmandia.com, (5.6 million); About.com/food, (5.6 million).
Condé Nast recently said it was reviving the defunct magazine Gourmet as an iPad and tablet-friendly application to be called Gourmet Live, launching later this year. Gourmet and its foodie sister pub Bon Appétit will also be dished up as special-interest print editions later this year, reports Mediaweek.
Condé Nast CEO Charles Townsend said that within several years, he hopes to be making about $20 million from Gourmet Live, but only about $1 million is expected to be sponsor- or advertising-related. The rest will be from consumers making small payments to access specific information, either on an item-by-item basis or via a monthly or yearly fee.
Spanfeller, on the other hand, says, his site “will initially be free. The majority of revenue will be advertising.”
Salvo fired
One of the byproducts of poaching Group President David Carey from Condé Nast to be the new president of Hearst Magazines, will be some high-profile talent raids by Carey on his former stomping grounds, some experts are predicting.
Carey was saying all the right things when the bombshell announcement was made, how he might bring “maybe my assistant” and that there were lots of good people at Hearst.
But the spirit of détente that has existed between the two publishing giants for the past five years has been effectively shattered and a more heated rivalry is likely in the months ahead.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see some raids on Condé Nast,” said Steve Blacker, a former executive at Condé and more recently a consultant at Hearst. “He’s one of the more cerebral guys in publishing, he’s very good at picking people and he knows all the top sales and marketing people at Condé Nast,” said Blacker. “He’s going to have the ability to hire anyone he wants.”
Not written very strongly into the first-day stories was the angle that Cathie Black appears to be heading into semi-retirement. But she lost out on a chance to move further up the corporate hierarchy when Victor Ganzi was hired as CEO in the late 1990s, and then lost out again when Ganzi was fired in June 2008 and she was not tapped as the eventual successor.
No moss
Many pundits thought that the print version of Rolling Stone would be harmed because Politico.com and Time.com had briefly posted — in advance — the riveting article that savaged the career of General Stanley McChrystal and forced his resignation.
All the versions were posted days before McChrystal was busted for his disparaging comments about President Obama‘s key staffers.
But all the Web publicity before the print edition arrived — rather than harm the actual maga zine — seems to have fu eled newsstand sales.
Although of course it could be that Lady Gaga‘s cover is doing the trick.
One circulation source said that first weekend sales of the mag azine put it on target to sell about 200,000 copies.
That’s nearly double the 107,000 copies that the company had been averaging for the previous six months on newsstands.
A company spokesman would not confirm the projection, but did say, “We expect it to be easily the best-selling issue of the year.”
The Web version also generated 7 million unique visitors to the site. So it seems that the Web publicity only helped fuel interest in the magazine.