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Hauser Talks Up Twitter, Digital Diversification
Monday, August 17, 2009

Time Inc.’s president of digital for the Style and Entertainment Group, Fran Hauser, says that People.com gets more feedback and questions from Twitter now than it gets from the main site’s own contact link. “It has become a customer service platform for us,” she told AdAge in a video interview. People's Twitter page now has 1.1 million followers. InStyle has 880,000 followers. Hauser was named one of AdAge’s “Women to Watch” as she recently expanded her portfolio from People.com to EW, Essence, InStyle, and People en Espanol.

Hauser dropped a few revealing tidbits about the traction Time Inc. is enjoying with its digital endeavors. For instance, she revealed that the People.com mobile site got 18 million page views last month. Users are not just surfing the mobile Web and drilling into known brands like People, but “they are consuming a lot of content,” she says.

Another revealing number Hauser dropped was the 60 million “try-ons” that the InStyle virtual makeover tool has attracted. The company is rolling out a version for People en Espanol.

Revenue diversification appears to be a key part of Hauser and Time Inc.’s digital strategy. The recently released iPhone app for the People brand reached the 4th most popular paid application slot in the iTunes App Store at one point. Hauser says she is encouraged by the hybrid model that the app represents: a fee to users plus an ad revenue stream. The People Celebrity Tracker App has fallen back to 88th in the App store more than a month after its initial release, but among branded media apps, it remains second only to The Weather Channel (#33). People's success on mobile suggests that familiar brands have special leverage and power to rise above the clutter on the platform.

In another example of revenue stream diversification, People.com has partnered with games distributor BigFish to sell downloadable casual and hard core game titles via the site’s games area. Time Inc. will get a share of those e-commerce fees. Under Hauser’s leadership, People.com became one of the largest eyeball funnels online, with over 600 million monthly pages view (per min’s Digital Box Scores, May, 2009).

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