Can Glamour And GQ's Brands Support A Dating Site?

What goes around comes around: In the '90s, Conde Nast's Internet branch CondeNet shut down the thriving dating and personals service it ran through its Swoon website, ceding the lucrative space to Match, Nerve and eHarmony.

Now the company (facing a brutal round of closures, layoffs and cutbacks) has decided to try again, with trulymadlydating.com, aimed at matching women who read Glamour with GQ's male audience. Gawker's sleuths note the site appears aimed at the British market and is operated by The Dating Lab.

Conde Nast (my former employer, I need to note) moved quickly onto the Internet in the mid-90s, though it was slow to evolve online for a while thereafter. Swoon was their early attempt to take content from print magazines like Glamour, Self, and Mademoiselle and package it under new stand-alone web brands. Swoon, focused on relationship content, and Phys, which was about health and fitness, are long gone, but Conde Nast's approach of separate web brands continues with Style.com (fashion content from Vogue and W), Epicurious for food and Concierge for travel.

The move into the personals space, though innovative, has risks. For dating sites to thrive, they must reach critical mass; a national site that isn't sufficiently populated can fizzle if users can't find much selection locally. Further, it isn't clear if a magazine brand can attract users to a dating site; men and women may neither identify strongly enough with GQ or Glamour nor see the other magazine's readership (or web audience) as an ideal target. On the other hand, if people signing up are being thrown into a larger Dating Lab pool, will they be disappointed when their matches don't have any of the promised connection to the magazines?

Some critics see a misfire. Guest of a Guest asks: "how successful can this site be when it’s based around the fashion industry and pairing heterosexual couples?" Fashionista's Abby Gardner agrees: "c’mon I don’t really think of it as the go-to place for straight men, not that those are the only pairings that the site can offer up…just the ones I would be in the market for." The name "trulymadlydating" doesn't exactly sound like the ideal title to pull in straight men.

All magazine companies face a dilemma online. Print magazines are stubbornly difficult to translate to the Internet, yet innovating into new online areas like dating can take publishers well beyond their core competence. They're also chained to a print-industry organizational structure which is less than ideal for building online success. Conde Nast stumbled with the ambitious, failed launch of a fashion-oriented social networking site for teen girls, Flip.com, misgauging market demand and misunderstanding the dynamics that lead some social networks to take off. (Contrast Flip with the thumbs-up, thumbs-down style advice site Fashism, an Internet-only startup that might seem a natural fit for Conde Nast's audience.) But as print gives way to digital media, publishers see no choice but to experiment.

On the other hand, Conde Nast's service is bound to offer a more civilized method of matching stylish women with affluent men than the much-mocked "Fashion Meets Finance" parties.