Flip.com was launched in February 2007. Today Conde Nast, which owns flip.com, announced that it was reversing its strategy saying that Flip will be “reshaped as a flexible web application designed to live on social networking platform, starting with Facebook.”
Translation: “We give up.”
From the above you can see that at its peak flip.com was getting over 400,000 monthly users, so what happened?
I think there are a number of reasons:
- The campaign money ran out - social communities need to keep going far longer than your average campaign timeframe otherwise the time invested by your audience will turn from advocacy to distrust.
- There weren’t enough clearly defined success criteria to guage whether more investment should be made in maintaining it.
- The ‘niche’ they were going for (teenage girls) wasn’t niche enough. It was too big a market segment to succeed.
- Flip.com was born out of a print culture - they couldn’t conceive of simply building an application - which is what they’ve ended up with, so they created alot of editorial that people didn’t read or interact with.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens…
