But can she edit a title advertisers will buy?

By Jeff Bercovici

  Everyone knows that sex sells magazines. The question is, does it sell advertising?
    The folks at Nerve are aiming to find out. For over two years now they’ve been using sex—or rather, "literary smut," in Nerve’s idiom--to sell ad space on their website, nerve.com. And now they’re expanding the brand with a new print magazine, due out in March.
    "We’re going after edgier fashion advertisers, and ‘sin’ advertisers like liquor and tobacco," says Susan Dominus, editor-in-chief of the print magazine, who has been with Nerve since last June.
    Despite her high-profile spot in the sexual vanguard, Dominus comes to Nerve not from a career cracking whips and pouring wax in an S&M dungeon but from a fairly conventional magazine background.
    She spent some time at New York magazine as a senior editor and before that at Glamour, where she was struck by the intimate relationship between staff and readers.
    An online magazine makes that kind of closeness easier to achieve, says Dominus. Nerve’s print magazine will borrow the online vehicle’s practice of publishing reader feedback to stories. Whereas conventional magazines print readers’ letters weeks or months after the fact, Nerve can take advantage of its dual nature to publish responses online immediately after an article appears in print.
    In this way, even as the website promotes the print magazine, the print magazine will channel readers back to the web site.
    Naturally the two magazines, which for all practical purposes share a staff, will engage in a good deal of content sharing.
    "Eventually everything from the print magazine will go on the site, but not immediately and not all at once," says Dominus.
    Among new sections created for the magazine is "Diary," which Dominus describes as "a cross between [the New Yorker’s] ‘Talk of the Town’ and ‘Penthouse Letters.’"
     Content will include "more reported, on-the-scenes type material" than on the website. In addition, Dominus has been finding that many authors are more willing to have their work appear in print then on-line.
     She’s already secured submissions from writer Robert Olen Butler and noted photographer Nan Goldin.
    Subscriptions to the magazine will be chiefly sold online, to keep costs down and to take advantage of Nerve’s high brand-recognition among web-goers. The site is host to 750,000 unique visitors a month; Nerve expects 50,000 of them will want the magazine.
    A small enough circulation to be sure, but a fairly select one: young, affluent, and college-educated, by and large. The kind of readers advertisers like to reach.
      As far as advertisers go, however, Nerve has always been in something of a double bind, says Eric Murnighan, ad director for Nerve.com.
    "Companies that want to advertise with us, such as Playboy and adult booksellers, we have no interest in. Companies we try to get, like AOL or Mitsubishi, aren’t always comfortable with our content. We walk a fine line."
      The print product’s strategy will be similar to the webzine’s: they’ll be going after advertisers who demonstrate what Murnighan calls "the hipster feel." That includes fashion companies like Boo.com, which already advertises on the website, as well as liquor companies, none of which advertise with Nerve yet.
     The print magazine should also get an additional boost from tobacco advertising, which is prohibited online.
    As for promoting the launch, says Dominus, "There will be a damn good party."

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.