Vanity Fair is in deep trouble.
Semrush reports that the Conde Nast title’s web traffic fell 55% in April.
According to Semrush: “In April vanityfair.com received 3.73M visits with the average session duration 06:30. Compared to March traffic to vanityfair.com has decreased by -55.02%.”
In March, VanityFair.com had puffed up to 8.29 million. Even in February, the number was 6.23 million.
That’s not all. ComScore agrees. They say VanityFair.com fell to 6 million monthly visits, putting them well behind other entertainment sites like Variety, Rolling Stone, the NY Post’s Page Six, and Harper’s Bazaar.
So where did everyone go?
Vanity Fair is now being run by Mark Guiducci, the 36 year old pal of Anna Wintour’s daughter. His prior experience is not on a par with Graydon Carter, Tina Brown, or even Radhika Jones. Guiducci is mostly known for running a live event called Vogue World.
Since the new regime took over, Vanity Fair has become a mystery to former readers. The magazine profiled Trump White House staffers, which was weird enough. They put Kylie Jenner on the cover instead of acknowledging the Oscars. And that wasn’t good for Kylie’s boyfriend, Timothee Chalamet, who doesn’t understand that the cover killed his chances at winning an Academy Award.
Indeed, the “Hollywood issue” appeared in December, for some reason. It featured no women, and the wrong men. The message was: “we are clueless.”
Cover stories are a disaster, too. Another one this winter was actress Margaret Qualley, who’s very talented but largely unknown to the greater public. Almost immediately, the story — which had no juice of any kind — was disappeared from the site’s homepage.
The editors don’t seem to know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. A big issue is that they got rid of their Hollywood team, which had the connections and the savvy to gauge hits. The current staff has missed covering any of the big movie hits. They could have just put Michael Jackson on the cover and had a win.Â
And then there are the parties. The Oscar party, with a guest list cut in half, was not a success. Tomorrow, the annual Cannes party is not at the Hotel du Cap, but at a pop up restaurant way at the wrong end of the Cannes beach. The sponsor is Meta, which means a lot of influencers and tech people.
Also, so far no one has seen Guiducci in Cannes this week. But he did host a podcast in New York with Jack Schlossberg, the Kennedy running for Congress in Manhattan. Carter or Brown would have been holding forth on the Croisette. As it is, Carter is hosting a Cannes soiree on Tuesday with CAA super agent Bryan Lourd. Ouch!
Wintour installed Guiducci as editorial director, a pawn for her enjoyment. The results are not promising. Since Jones became editor the magazine has been in decline. But these new figures should sound alarms.Â
