I ended up spending the Memorial Day holiday weekend in Las Vegas, a city in which I do not set foot particularly often. When I wasn't partaking in my preferred activity of lounging by the hotel pool with a good book and a pina colada (yes, that's right, I don't gamble), I decided to test-drive a new iPhone app. Namely, it's the free app from lifestyle e-newsletter UrbanDaddy, which hit the iTunes App Store earlier this week.
UrbanDaddy--which operates city-specific newsletters for New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, and Los Angeles, as well as a "national" edition and a weekly travel guide--targets the young, louche, and well-moneyed, or at least those who want to be. Its newsletters frequently cover high-end restaurant and bar openings, as well as exotic vacation destinations. For its iPhone app, the company opted to build an automated "concierge" that will suggest activities for you if you fill in what you're looking for.
The interface and concept are very, very cool. It's like playing a Mad-Libs game to find out what you can do that day or night: the app will fill in your time and location, and then you specify what you're looking for (dinner, drinks, dancing, etc.) and who you're with (parents, friends, boss, ex) and then a few options for the situation. When I was looking for a Sunday brunch in Vegas, for example, the options included "and we want great bacon," "and we want champagne," or "and we're hung over." Like I said, very cool setup.
The results, however, were lacking. UrbanDaddy CEO Lance Broumand told me that the directory has been curated to only include establishments that fit the tastes of the newsletter's discerning target audience, which meant that my "and we want great bacon" brunch selection would not be bringing up the local Denny's. That said, the app only brings up very basic contact information for the restaurant or bar it's chosen for you--no hints at prices, no reviews from users, no tips like "the drink menu is really girly," "crowd is full of d-bags on Friday nights," or "vegetarians need not apply."
I realize that both the serendipity factor and the "money's not an issue" overtones are part of UrbanDaddy's carefully constructed image (complete with a Lexus sponsorship), but it certainly puts a damper on how helpful it can be when you're in an unfamiliar city.
These things, obviously, can come in version 2.0. But for now--especially in Vegas, where things can be alternately rock-bottom-cheap or unexpectedly expensive--it was too much of a gamble (ha, ha) for my tastes. After an unsuccessful quest to find great bacon, I went right back to the lounge chair by the pool.
This post was updated at 3:50 p.m. PT to correct the list of cities for which UrbanDaddy publishes newsletters.
Since the new-media press has been gushing about e-newsletter start-ups for the past few hours, here's another tidbit: UrbanDaddy, a daily missive about luxury culture for the young and hedonistic, is set to announce its Miami regional edition, adding to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and a "Jetset" travel edition. (For the record, that's "daddy" as in "mack daddy," as this e-newsletter clearly has zilch to do with parenting.)
UrbanDaddy, which has about 315,000 subscribers and says it's doubling that year-over-year, is particularly notable for two quirky reasons: one, you have to be referred by a friend to join, which puts a choke on viral growth and keeps subscriber numbers on the low end, but gives it cachet. Two, it's a New York-based newsletter start-up that's never been affiliated with the Pilot Group--more unusual than you might think. That investment firm, headed by former MTV and AOL exec Bob Pittman, has quite the penchant for the newsletter niche: it took a majority stake in and then flipped Ideal Bite to Disney earlier this year, and reportedly has just sold DailyCandy to Comcast for $125 million.
It's likely that a sizeable portion of UrbanDaddy's readership can't actually afford the bottle-service nightclubs, private islands in the Baltic, and travel packages to eco-friendly Caribbean golf resorts that are detailed in its daily e-mails. But the company can score advertisements from high-end fashion and liquor brands that are within reach of the guys who want Ferraris, and that's what brings in the cash. (The site has not disclosed revenues.)
UrbanDaddy also operates a small men's fashion blog, Kempt.
Women's e-newsletter start-up DailyCandy seems like a better fit for Conde Nast than Comcast, but Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that the cable company has acquired it for $125 million. The blog wrote that Viacom had been in the running, too; a Viacom spokesman told CNET News.com on Tuesday evening that while the media conglomerate had been interested, it had never made a bid for DailyCandy and had dropped out in early June.
DailyCandy's demographic of trendy urban women is a niche that advertisers love, but it's still a higher price tag than many observers expected.
The company had already been acquired once, by former AOL exec Bob Pittman's Pilot Group investment firm. That was for about $3 million five years ago; DailyCandy now employs about 60 people and has published two books. It's the second e-newsletter that the Pilot Group has flipped this year, having sold the much younger "eco" publication Ideal Bite to Disney for around $15 million; the firm still owns a majority stake in slacker-dude list Thrillist.
Comcast has recently acquired Movies.com and contacts management company Plaxo.
This post was updated at 6:16 p.m. PT with comment from Viacom and 7:39 p.m. to clarify wording on the company's interest in DailyCandy.
Glam Media has always insisted that it's not just an ad network, and an announcement the women's-focused media firm made Monday underscored that.
Glam has launched "Glam Today," a daily newsletter featuring a selection of content from the more than 500 sites in its network of independently run blogs that serve the company's ads.
"Glam Today surfaces and highlights some of the best content created daily by the professional publishers across the Glam network," Ryan Roslansky, Glam Media's vice president of products, said in a release Monday. "Glam Media's focus on packaging display advertising with relevant content extends is core to everything we do and extends to our premium e-mail products like Glam Today designed for publishers."
It's a five-day-a-week affair: Monday's newsletter will focus on fashion and shopping, Tuesday's on beauty, Wednesday's on "living," Thursday's on entertainment, and Friday's on health.
It's a bit surprising that Glam hasn't launched something like this before: for the parent company, it's another outlet for ads, and for sites in the Glam network, it's more exposure, as well as, perhaps, the cozy feeling that they're part of something more than a plain old ad network.
There are plenty of e-mail newsletters focusing on the women's market, though. DailyCandy has been around for years and is extremely popular, though it should be said that its newsletters focus primarily on women in select U.S. cities, and Sugar has a newsletter called (wait for it...) DailySugar.
Other popular online newsletters have primarily female readerships, like Vital Juice Daily and Ideal Bite (just acquired by Disney).
DailyCandy crowds a SoHo bookstore for its book launch party on Tuesday night.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)NEW YORK--Tuesday night was the first time I'd been to a digital-media-related event at a bookstore, unless you count the time that Google threw a conference at the New York Public Library.
It was the launch party for girly e-newsletter DailyCandy's new book, The DailyCandy Lexicon: Words That Don't Exist But Should, at the McNally Robinson bookstore-cafe in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. Refreshments consisted of rum cocktails and, not surprisingly, candy.
Sample entry in the book: "textual frustration: a late-night text exchange that fails to result in old-fashioned lip-locking." DailyCandy staffers told me that about half the entries in the book are wholly original, and the other half are sourced from "Lexicon"-themed DailyCandy e-mails from over the years.
The party was mostly full of DailyCandy's own sundress-clad legions--the company employs about 60 people--and their friends. Fellow blog folk were few and far between, though a handful of people from nearby new-media companies like Flavorpill and Gawker showed up. So did Bob Pittman, the MTV executive turned AOL executive turned Pilot Group chief, whose investment firm owns a majority stake in DailyCandy. (Regrettably, Pittman left before I had a chance to ask him about his reported foray into the tequila business.)
I also didn't get a good answer to this question: Why is there such an impulse to turn a blog (or, in DailyCandy's case, an online newsletter) into a book?
This blogs-to-books trend seems to keep chugging along, despite the fact that none of their predecessors have been particularly successful. Gawker Media's Guide to Conquering All Media sold dismally, as schadenfreude-happy blogger Jeff Bercovici gleefully pointed out. Options, the book takeoff of the wildly popular Fake Steve Jobs blog, wasn't exactly a chart-topper, either. And now there are books either just out or on the way for blogs Stuff White People Like, I Can Has Cheezburger, Postcards From Yo Momma, Passive-Aggressive Notes, and a heap of others.
For a popular blogger, somewhat ironically, getting a "dead-tree tie-in" (to quote Bercovici) seems to be the way of knowing you've made it. But is that canceled out if it doesn't sell well?
DailyCandy, for what it's worth, has a much more longstanding brand than the likes of I Can Has Cheezburger, and it already has an earlier book (DailyCandy A to Z, published in 2006) under its belt. But the question still stands: why venture offline when the online brand seems to be doing just fine on its own? Will it really convert enough new readers to offset the cost and energy of book publishing? Is a "blog book" really just an ego boost?
The world may never know.
New York-based dude-about-town newsletter Thrillist--I've heard its founders describe it as "DailyCandy for guys," though the two are not affiliated--will be expanding further beyond its Gotham roots very soon. Today's edition of the morning read announced that sign-ups are now open for the upcoming Thrillist San Francisco list.
Presumably, it'll be like its existing Gotham and Los Angeles brethren: a mix of restaurant and bar picks with a distinct penchant for high-quality barbecue and stiff cocktails; edgy shopping picks (don't worry, boys, it's O.K. to look dashing); and the latest in the hyperlocal Web, like yesterday's Thrillist New York pick, the Ugly Outfits New York blog.
(Don't live in one of those three cities? There's also a "Thrillist Nation" list for everyone else. The quality's up to par, though the content typically isn't quite as good because the insider-y, "local expert" slant is what makes the New York and Los Angeles editions so readable.)
"This is a big deal for us," the Thrillist e-mail wrote in the announcement that its San Francisco edition is imminent. "We're psyched to get started in a city where the mayor sexes up his underlings, the waters churn with man-eating sharks, and people consume more alcohol per capita than anywhere else in the country (sorry Louisiana and parts of Texas)."
The Bay Area has never sounded so...macho.
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