The 60-Second Interview: Daniel Saynt, EVP of Digital at Nylon Media
The 60-second interview: Daniel Saynt, Executive Vice President of Digital at Nylon Media.
CAPITAL: Nylon Media debuted its new domain name last week, saying goodbye to Nylonmag.com. Why pay a cybersquatter $225,000 for Nylon.com?
SAYNT: I think it’s really important for us to establish that this brand is more than just a magazine. I think NylonMag.com really does play into the fact that it is a magazine, it is a publication, and that will always still be a part of what our brand is. But there’s so much more to Nylon and there’s so much more to how we see the brand evolving that it’s extremely important for us to own our name. So paying the cybersquatter…the amount we had to pay was absolutely necessary. It was one of the main investments we knew we would have to make when [Diversis Capital] purchased the company, and it was something that we were surprised that it ended up being one of the most expensive domain name purchases for a fashion magazine or for a media company, but definitely worth it and it’s definitely something that will keep paying us back, many times over.
CAPITAL: Editor in chief Michelle Lee has dropped hints of Nylon.com offering more online exclusive content in the future. What kind of content should we expect?
SAYNT: With the purchase of Nylon, we merged with FashionIndie.com, which was a company that I started. FashionIndie.com has over 200 contributors and writers, many of which are top fashion bloggers and beauty bloggers. So what’s going to happen is you’re going to start seeing a lot more original content coming from these content producers. So more of the influencers giving us exclusive things that will not live on their sites and that will live exclusively on Nylon.com.
In addition, we’re increasing the amount of contributors that we have for the site itself. We just added Julia Shutenko (now Lundin), who’s a former [Vogue] market editor, who is based in London, who is our London correspondent...We also had contribution from [Michael Dumler of] OnAbbotKinney, a street-style photographer based out of L.A., who is now shooting a few of the music festivals specifically for us, so that was a great addition as well.
We’re increasing our content frequency. When we first purchased Nylon, they were producing about six articles a day. We’re going to be increasing the frequency to 30 to 40 articles a day, leading up to September. And then in September, we’re expecting a full relaunch, so you’ll see how all these elements play together and live in one place.
CAPITAL: More and more website traffic is coming from mobile devices these days. How is Nylon.com dealing with that paradigm shift?
SAYNT: We’re doing great in mobile. We have a fairly responsive site right now. We see the real opportunities now in coming from people going directly to the site through mobile, but also the introduction of an app that can actually take all that content, put it all together, make sure to send the mobile subscriber notifications and updates as to when things are coming through and encouraging more people to experience the content through that. But mobile will remain strong. The way that our content is being built out, not only will the site be mobile-ly friendly, but it will also be shoppable, so you can shop from your mobile phone.
CAPITAL: What’s the strategy behind launching Nylon Español and should we expect more international editions of the magazine in the future?
SAYNT: The person who was running Nylon Mexico, a licensee, kind of presented us the opportunity to purchase back and buy the publication...We had the opportunity to take it and we were like, we want a Spanish-language magazine in the U.S. We see that as a huge opportunity. There are so many of our readers who are asking for Spanish-language content and for more features on Latin American artists, and just expanding our music reach and really focusing in on this section that has no attention on it from the U.S. in a lot of ways.
So we really wanted to have that here, as well as eventually expand into Spain and across Latin America with Nylon Español magazine, online and through digital. All the content that is being produced for Nylon Espanol will eventually live on Nylon.com. You’ll be able to go from a Spanish version of the site to an English version of the site, and when you go to the Spanish-language, it’s the Spanish content that we’re having produced. That content is also getting translated…We plan to take a similar strategy for our licensees in Indonesia, Japan, Korea and Singapore.
CAPITAL: A number of top Nylon employees, including executive editor Ashley Baker, resigned after ownership of the magazine passed to Diversis Capital and co-founders Marvin Scott and Jaclynn Jarrett were dispatched from the publication. How have readers responded to this editorial shift?
SAYNT: Well, we definitely haven’t seen too much response from the readers. Ashley stayed on to help us with the next issue. She was here until we had Michelle as a replacement. I don’t think our readers are going to see too much of a shift. Through the process of all these changes, and even though we’re losing key people and losing editorial staff, we actually increased in traffic, we increased in the amount of content we produce and the quality of content we’re producing for Nylon.com actually increased as well.…You’re going to start seeing really interesting shifts, because even though the Jarretts were here and they were running the magazine, there wasn’t as much creativity allowed. And creative control was very tightly held.
It’s always going to be somewhere where a new team comes in, a new editor in chief comes in, a new group comes in—you’re going to have some drop-off, and we were expecting it. But now it’s at the point where we have our new editor in chief in place. She’s bringing on an amazing team of people to really make the magazine what we envision it to be, and I think through that and through her involvement in dotcom...we’re going to have a much stronger publication in the end. So, it sucks, but yeah.
First Appeared in Capital New York
