Flip.com

» see flip.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The unit of content on Flip.com was the flipbook: a page of photos and text that a teenage girl assembled and then shared with the friends she had invited. Condé Nast owned the magazines that had been selling exactly that aesthetic on paper for decades, and the theory was that it could sell the same thing as a website with the magazines pointing readers at it.

Condé Nast was the right company for this in every way except the one that mattered. It knew the demographic and it had the art direction, but it could not send Flip.com enough traffic to reach the size where a social network starts working on its own. Teenagers in 2007 already had somewhere to do this, and that somewhere was MySpace. Flip was later retooled to work alongside MySpace and Facebook rather than against them, which is the move a product makes when it has stopped expecting to win.

I was twenty-three in 2007 and at university, and this was a site for girls roughly ten years younger than me on another continent. Flip never had a Turkish edition and never needed one. The scrapbook habit it was built on was real here too, but in 2007 it was happening on hi5 and in MSN display pictures, not in a Condé Nast product nobody in Ankara had heard of.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the second of december ~

CondéNet finished a budget review in late November 2008. Flip.com's closure came out of it, and the notice went public on 2 December with the site set to go dark on 16 December. Fourteen days, in the middle of a financial crisis that had publishers everywhere cutting whatever was not paying for itself.

The email to users is the detail that stuck. Flip told people that if they wanted to keep the scrapbooking projects they had made, they might want to print them. There was no export offered and no transfer to another service, so for anything a user had made on Flip.com the recommended archive format was paper.

~ what a magazine thought a network was ~

Flip.com is a clean specimen of the 2006-2008 belief that a media company could buy its way into a social network the same way it launched a title, by picking a demographic and spending money on it. The accounts of the closure name internal mismanagement and staff departures, but the structural problem is simpler: a magazine arrives with an audience it can talk to and no audience that can talk to each other.

Condé Nast had bought Reddit in 2006 and Ars Technica in 2008, so this was not a company that failed to understand the web. It was a company that could buy a network and could not grow one.

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