Every day, thousands of stylish women upload pictures of their outfits, their hair, their nails — essentially, expressions of their style — to personal blogs. Those images are viewed, collected and spread across aggregation sites like Pinterest, Tumblr and Lookbook.nu — and soon, on the website of Lucky magazine.
The Conde Nast-title is planning to launch a vertical powered by user-generated content in mid-August. The vertical, dubbed “Community,” will pull from a pool of bloggers who have applied to have their content featured on luckymag.com. Lucky‘s web editors, using an app called Tidal, will then be able to sort through contributions to find the ones that are most likely to perform well — i.e., have high-resolution images, are written in English, and already have a decent amount of pageviews and comments on their own sites.
Like Teen Vogue‘s Fashion Click, which is also powered by Tidal, certain sections will appear in a vertical, blog-like format, while others — like nail art, and verticals for popular brands — will appear in a Pinterest-like grid (see below).
Lucky editor-in-chief Brandon Holley describes Community as the “third tier” of its content pyramid. The first is occupied by Lucky editors and the second by Style Collective, a hand-selected network of 140 style bloggers who cross-post their content to luckymag.com in exchange for a portion of ad revenue and exposure. The third will open the field to more recreational bloggers — those who post four to five times per month and perhaps write only occasionally about fashion, rather than once or twice per day — as well as those who develop more niche types of content than Lucky covers: say, for example, the woman who blogs about vintage finds in Atlanta, says Holley.
Unlike Style Collective bloggers, contributors to Community will receive no monetary compensation for their content. They will, however, enjoyed the SEO benefits of being linked (rather obscurely) from luckymag.com.
Holley says she is hoping to double luckymag.com’s traffic over the next six to nine months, and double it again after that. Traffic currently hovers between 1 million and 1.5 million uniques per month, a Lucky spokesperson said. Including Style Collective, monthly traffic is around 2.3 million.
Beyond Community, the magazine is also preparing to release its first iPad edition, as well as an upgrade to its Lucky Shopper application later in the year.
“The road map is very big and there’s a lot of investment being made,” says Holley. Given what we’ve seen of Community, which is aesthetically pleasing to navigate and appears easy to manage on the back-end, those investments are being made in the right place.
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