CondeNet UK Takes Mobile Content Off-Portal To Sell Ads

CondéNet UK, the digital arm of magazine publisher Condé Nast, is taking its mobile sites off-portal to allow it to sell ads and to market the sites online and in print, reports Brand Republic. This week, GQ Mobile and Glamour Mobile will be the first to go exclusively off portal. Currently, they are available only on Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) Live and O2 Active. CondeNet also plans to roll out Vogue Mobile off portal next and plans to take all of its mobile sites off portal by the end of the year. CondeNet's mobile editor Charlotte Duck told Brand Republic that being on the network's portals meant that the operators controlled the advertising, and sometimes the editorial content. "Now that we own the sites we can sell pages to our own clients and cut out the middle man," said Duck. She also reported that they'd actually been considering the move for a "long time" but the operator's high price for off-portal browsing had put them off. Now that data prices have fallen, Duck expects many of her competitors to do the same. CondeNet has teamed up with Wapfly to format their content for the mobile web.