Tina Brown says Daily Beast hit 3.9 million monthly uniques, launching book imprint
Fans of the New Yorker still won’t ever forgive her for that Roseanne Barr guest-edited issue.
Beyond our wildest hopes when we started last October. We closed September at 3.9 million monthly unique readers and 35 million page views, which is up 70 percent and 220 percent, respectively, since our first month. It took me eight years to build Vanity Fair to less than half that number. And the readers are loyal: 60 percent of them come back again within 24 hours. Of course, keeping ‘em satisfied is a 24/7 task. I know what the tireless blogger Andrew Sullivan means when he told me last summer that he sometimes feels like Fay Wray dancing in front of King Kong.
And the foray into the offline world:
It’s been nothing but new developments round here. Last week we announced our foray into book publishing, a new imprint called Beast Books that we are launching with Perseus Books Group. It gives our writers the chance to develop ideas that have already exploded on the site for a fast, short book that will be published first electronically and then as an elegant paperback. I’ve always wanted to do it. Books are the new magazines.
