Magazine giant Conde Nast launched its first website in 1995: food resource Epicurious.
Yet the publisher’s glossy monthly The World of Interiors – which was launched in November 1981 and is nowadays is printed on the best stock in the building at Conde Nast’s London HQ – only really began its digital life in October 2022.
Previously The World of Interiors did have a website but it was an interiors index with no editorial presence.
Digital director Elly Parsons joined the brand six months before its website launch and described the news website as a “quick process, but that forced us to be very decisive and clear with what we wanted”.
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She told Press Gazette The World of Interiors was “fashionably late” online.
“I think that The World of Interiors has always been a print-obsessed product – the audience loves it, and we’re always going to have, in my mind, print being really, really central, but I think for all of us it just felt like time and it felt like there was so much experimentation that could be done to bring this kind of heritage brand online,” she said.
“And remember, it was just post-pandemic when there was such a surge in interiors and people wanting to be more expressive in their homes. I think it just felt like the right moment to bring this very niche but very beloved interiors brand online.”
Yet Parsons, previously digital editor at design magazine Wallpaper* and managing editor at Refinery29, acknowledged that The World of Interiors was “starting from a baseline of zero two years ago, where our competitors and the other titles in our area are 20 years in” and have therefore been able to develop the relationships with their audiences and with Google and the social platforms.
“So there definitely is challenge there, but what we have been able to do, and I think this is where my decade of experience working really focused in digital publishing has come into play, is because we’ve been able to learn from a lot of the mistakes and slip-ups that other digital publications have made over the years, and start with a really clear vision for what we want to achieve. So there have been blessings as well as challenges with being so late.”
For example, Parsons cited the decision at The World of Interiors to focus on engagement metrics like dwell times rather than going through the same journey as many other publishing brands towards, and then away from, page views.
“It’s much, much more important for me to have this quality audience who we are actually getting more lifetime value from.
“Average read times are really, really important to us and our business model and our engagement model, whereas a lot of brands take the approach of growth for growth sake and just reaching as many people as they possibly can.
“We’ve just really made a conscious choice to focus first on the quality of the content and really leaning on this kind of audience that we already have in print and trying to bring them along for the ride and bring them along on the journey with us.
“What The World of Interiors has always been known for from the off is its devoted fanbase, which is a beautiful thing, a hugely intimidating thing for a digital director coming in who’s trying to not alienate everyone, but what we found is that actually, we’ve managed to convert those print readers into people who also love the digital stuff that we’re doing, and we’re seeing that in the kind of dwell times that we’re seeing.
“Our loyal readers, the ones who return more than once a month, they’re spending ten minutes on the site, which is just such a huge amount of time for any website.”
On the other end, SEO has provided “the biggest challenge in terms of trying to catch up with where we should be as a digital platform in 2024 because even though we have the print archive, we don’t have a digital archive of things that we can just fall back on and constantly refresh and update.
“But we have been seeing that Google is our fastest-growing referral source, so we’re making up for lost time where we can there, and the way we’ve done that is to target very kind of niche, secondary long tail keywords, rather than going after the bigger keywords that our competitors are. And what that has enabled us to do is rank highly for very specific things.”
For example Parsons cited the keywords “Lee Miller best photographs” in reference to Vogue’s World War II war correspondent who was played in a movie this year by Kate Winslet.
“It’s more targeted and the search volume is smaller, but the more niche keywords like that that we can get into number one position, the more that Google sort of respects our domain and will then help us when we come to target larger keywords.”
[Read more: What happened when British GQ stopped trying to ‘feed the algorithm’]
The World of Interiors has an editorial team of five but benefits from Conde Nast’s centralised departments like product, e-commerce and audience development.
She estimated that of about 40 articles that go up on the website each month, about half are digital-first commissions, about ten come from the current issue of the magazine, about five are from the archive dating back to 1981, and the final five may be updates to evergreen articles.
The magazine had an average monthly circulation of 54,165 in the UK in 2023, of which half were paid subscriptions, according to ABC.
Parsons puts print and digital as “equal in priority” and sees them as “just presenting one brand to the world”.
“There’s going to be love from the team for print always, it’s such a special thing. But I think my mode with the team has been to try and encourage people to feel empowered on the digital products and to really feel like they have ownership over them.
“There’s so much joy and experimentation that can come from digital publishing. We can be a little bit more free with it than we can in print, and there’s a lot more room and space to play,” she said, referring to video in particular.
Being a small team within Conde Nast’s wider network means they can be the ones to innovate and try things out: Parsons said The World of Interiors was the first of its UK brands to launch audio narration on articles this autumn.
Emily Tobin has begun reading out her monthly letters to readers, as have some of the brand’s other regular writers. Parsons said they are not using AI-generated audio at the moment but did not rule it out for the future.
“It’s directly linked to our time spent KPI, because… it just gives people another way to engage – and also we can layer advertising into the audio. That’s something that our partners in the US are doing on other Conde Nast titles. So it just opens up a whole other avenue for us, potentially.”
The World of Interiors primarily generates revenue through advertising, including many small but loyal decorating brands.
Parsons said: “I think a lot of it is about association, like they want to just be part of the brand because the quality is so, so high and they they trust us with their placement and their advertising because they know we put as much time and effort into these things as they do… That said, digital is opening up opportunities for us to work with really big, important, global companies.”
She referred to a two-year partnership with pens and luxury goods brand Mont Blanc which began this year with the inaugural World of Interiors Writing Prize which garnered 750 applicants in the UK and US.
Applicants were asked to write a 500-word story for publication in the magazine: “when you think about the amount of time somebody takes to sit and do that, and think about our product, and then think about the advertiser, in this case, Mont Blanc, that’s a hugely invested thing for an audience member to do,” Parsons said.
“I think it serves as a very good metaphor for what we’re trying to achieve digitally more broadly, that we just want people to spend time with us and get to know us and vice versa.”
The World of Interiors site has also just launched its first e-commerce stream: a bookshop featuring titles “selected, read and loved by our editors”.
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