Conde Nast Sells Ads in Flipboard Feeds From New Yorker, Bon Appetit and Wired

If at first Flipboard made magazine publishers nervous, now it's giving them something to love: more ad revenue. Several Conde Nast publications -- The New Yorker, Bon Appetit and Wired -- have started selling ads into the Flipboard iPad app in a bid to tap bigger tablet audiences and revenue. The ads will appear alongside Conde Nast content customized for Flipboard, a tablet reader that pulls in content from social feeds such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as well as news feeds from publications that users select. Conde Nast magazines' special Flipboard feeds are assembled by the magazine's editors. Conde is selling the accompanying ads and sharing the revenue with Flipboard. Conde Nast and Flipboard said the publisher is getting the majority of the revenue but declined to elaborate. Usually these sorts of deals see a revenue split somewhere from 60-40 to 70-30. The first advertisers to try Conde's arrangement with Flipboard are Lexus and American Express. The marketers created tablet-specific ads for Flipboard that could also run within the magazine's tablet apps, which Conde is hoping to promote as part of the effort. Each magazine will ultimately have four advertisers running in Flipboard. "It's incremental advertising revenue, part of an overall strategy to provide new channels for quality experiences for readers and advertisers," said Josh Stinchcomb, VP of digital sales at Conde Nast. Flipboard has cut its own ad deals before, but the Conde partnership is the first implementation of their evolved business model, which allows publishers to sell their own ads into the app. Mr. Stinchcomb said all Conde Nast titles will be moving to Flipboard in the coming year, including digital-only publications such as Epicurious and Style.com. "Our vision is for this to be a long-term partnership," Mr. Stinchcomb said. Flipboard has raised $60.5 million in venture capital and is now averaging 400 million "flips," or page views, a month, fueled in part by explosive sales of iPads. Apple has sold nearly 30 million iPads over the past year and a half.

Conde Nast Sells Ads in Flipboard Feeds From New Yorker, Bon Appetit and Wired

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