Earnings: Martha Stewart Omnimedia’s Online Plans; New Online Head

Martha Stewart Omnimedia is waking up late to the online potential, but they would be the first ones to admit it. But now, it is getting serious (and transitioning MarthaStewart.com from being an e-commerce play to being a media/destination site) with plans for a social network, and a site relaunch coming in Q1 07.
The company also announced earlier this week that it has hired Holly Brown as its new president of internet and will report directly to Susan Lyne, president and CEO of MSLO. Prior to this, Brown worked at Yahoo where was most recently the Chief of Staff for COO Dan Rosensweig. Also, it has added three other senior execs: Thomas Mueller has joined as Creative Director for the Internet, having held the same position at Razor Fish and Arnold Wann; Christine Cook is its new VP of Interactive Sales, and came from IAC; and Robert Kiernan is the new AVP and Director of Product Management, and joined from A&E Broadband Interactive and Advanced Television Product.
On the earnings side in Q2, it has online ad revenues of $2.1 million, up from $200,000 in the prior year quarter.
Form the earnings conference call (transcript via SeekingAlpha), the hopes of the company (and slightly naive calculations): “To give you a sense of our potential reach online, if just 25% of our 12 million living readers turned to our Website we’re talking about 3 million users. 25% of our weekly TV audience would translate to another 2.5 million. If we can draw 10% of the 70 million who say they buy Martha Stewart products we’re talking 7 million users and we’re determined to give those customers in every channel a multitude of reasons to visit our Website with alerts in our packaging and in pages; and by offering television viewers recipes and instructions for the projects they see on Martha’s show.”
Related:
Magazines Look For Ways To Mesh Social Networking With Built-In Community
Martha Stewart Plans Women’s Social Network

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