Men's Vogue to Launch

In a little over two weeks, Men's Vogue will be at your friendly neighborhood newsstand, begging the question of Vogue's strategy in an age of luxury.

So what's new?

The Seven Sisters have become The Gang of Four (People, US, In Touch and Life & Style generated over $295 million in retail revenues, or 18 percent of the $1.6 billion market), taking away the oxygen of lesser titles. At the same time, you're seeing many similar magazines targeting an upscale audience given away for free - especially to the right clientele, as I've noted before. And Vogue's online initiative? looking at ShopVogue's numbers, merely listing the URL in the magazine clearly isn't driving the traffic.

So what is there to do?

Conde Nast will have a more nuanced approach to the male market with Cargo at the sub-35 crowd  who's looking to accessorize their identity and now Men's Vogue targeting the guy who makes over $100K a year and pretty much knows what he wants out of life.

And as for the mass giveaways, magzine audit bureau ABC changed its rules governing agent sponsored-circulation last month, causing a stir among publishers, many of whom sought clarification. As many pioneers of web content found out the hard way, you can only give things away for free for so long.

As for ShopVogue.com, after a brief run, it's been taken down again, to be relaunched at a later time. I think it was brilliant to give advertisers an incentive to become more involved with the publication, but I think given the magazine's Manhattan-centric perspective, they might have done well to emulate their little sister Lucky in providing basic level of information on a much broader base of retailers, regardless of whether they are or have been advertisers.