The publisher of Vogue is to launch a new business-focused version of the magazine as they strive to open up innovative revenue sources.

Condé Nast says Vogue Business will be online only and aimed at professionals in the fashion industry, according to the Financial Times. It will initially be free to access, before charging for content, along with the publisher’s plans for a digital-paywall policy across all its titles in the US, which include the consumer-facing version of Vogue, Glamour, and GQ.

Several of the company’s other titles, The New Yorker, Wired and Vanity Fair, already have metered paywalls.

The company says the new Vogue title will fill “the gap in the market for industry decision-makers, from start-ups to CEOs”.

It will cover the "market currents, cultural movements, trends and technologies that will impact the fashion industry”, it said

The new title comes as Condé Nast looks to restructure its business by merging its international and US businesses and seeking a new chief executive to run the new entity.

This remodelling aims to make the company more agile as it hunts for new revenue streams as traditional print circulation and advertising struggle. There are no plans to create paywalls for titles outside the US, it says.

Observers see Vogue Business as part of new trend in the industry towards more niche publications, as publishers struggle to generate ad revenue from large-scale online audiences. US publishers BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and Gannett have cut 1,000 jobs between them this year.

Condé Nast International president Wolfgang Blau recently spoke to Digiday about opportunities for B2B subscriptions in addition to, “that whole ecosystem of conference and consulting and everything you can build around that”.

“The borders are really blurry between B2B and B2C,” he added.

“I’d say most of our conferences for instance are B2B, most of our current thinking goes more towards B2B, most of our editorial products — if not all — are B2C. They’re being sold as B2C while now the Vogues have a high share of B2B readers and in print it’s learnt behaviour to know which story is B2B or B2C. Digitally we want to untangle that a little bit over the course of this year.”

Vogue Business will begin mainly as a newsletter and be published twice weekly, edited by Lauren Indvik, a former editor of Fashionista.com

The company said 7,000 fashion industry professionals have been involved in beta-testing Vogue Business; these included senior executives at several of the world's major fashion brands.

Sourced from the Financial Times, Digiday; additional content by WARC staff