Wired.Com Article About iVillage...
A brief mention of SEEK. iVillage is obviously
growing in popularity. Long, long article.
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Where Women Surf
by Grace Lichtenstein
5:02amÿÿ2.Jun.98.PDT
It's 10 p.m.. Do you know where your mother is?
If she's wired, she might well be logged on to iVillage,
the network of women-oriented sites that emphasizes
messaging, chat, and advice. Thousands of women log
on to its nine channels, which include Parent Soup and
Better Health, to exchange ideas on everything from
teen smoking to herpes to building a family's
mutual-funds portfolio. "It gave me a world to be in
besides work and the kids," explains one working
mother of two from Maryland, who logged on to
Parent Soup after her marriage broke up. "I can't
imagine what my life would be like without it."
Current channels are Careers, Relationships, Food,
Beauty and Fitness, Shopping, Money, Work from
Home, Parenting, and Health, with three new channels
planned for the coming months. The site is on America
Online as well as the Web.
Communities are central at iVillage, which, according
to April 1998 statistics from Media Metrix, has the
largest reach -- 3.8 percent -- of any women's site. It
claims 65 million page views a month, which would put
it considerably ahead of Women.com, Hearst
Magazine's HomeArts, and Cond‚ Nast's Cond‚Net,
three other major women's destinations.
Chief Executive Candice Carpenter -- a lean,
fast-talking former television executive with an MBA
from Harvard -- says success has come to iVillage
because it deals "with women as they are, versus how
they should be." It is geared to "problem solving," she
declares, not "perfect biceps, perfect clothes, or
perfect hair."
iVillage offers little traditional content such as news
and feature articles. Instead, the site serves lots of
conversation, columns where physicians and other
experts answer members' questions, and deep
databases in which users can dig for more information.
For example, Work from Home offers a software library
filled with bookkeeping, billing, legal, payroll, and
sales-lead shareware. From Health, members can
access the huge store of medical information in the
Medline database.
The Beauty and Fitness page offers makeup tips, to be
sure, but it also has a message center pointedly
labeled Just The Way You Are. It is here that one
woman confesses to being embarrassed about "hairy
arms," while another admonishes: "If a person or so
called friends don't love u for yourself then they don't
deserve to be your friend."
In a forum within Parenting, a woman expressed
remorse about hitting her kids. iVillage stepped in and
got her professional help. In a Better Health forum, a
woman who had a worrisome mammogram asked for --
and got advice on -- "diagnosing a doctor's
diagnosis," plus suggestions of where to find more
information. In the Better Health section alone, more
than 160 message boards cover an enormous variety
of ailments, addictions, and preventive medicine.
In contrast, competing aggregate sites tend to
resemble traditional women's magazines. Women.com
features a mix of business, entertainment, and health
news and interactive tools; TV, music, and book
reviews; and Beatrice's Web Guide, a directory of Web
sites that was started in partnership with Yahoo.
Two other competing women's networks follow a more
traditional formula akin to women's magazines, with
sections related to the magazines they publish.
Hearst's HomeArts takes its cue from such
publications as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan,
and Country Living Gardener. Cond‚Net draws on
material from Mademoiselle, Self, Glamour, and its
food publications, in addition to publishing stories
written specifically for the Web and input from
visitors.
"We win a lot of bake-offs with advertisers because of
our support groups," Carpenter says. "Pharmaceutical
companies have told us that the only way to gain
acceptance is through a community."
iVillage, whose members' median age is about 33, has
really grown, says Carpenter, since it hit a money
crunch two years ago between financing rounds.
Although they had US$12 million in escrow, Carpenter
and co-founder and editor-in-chief Nancy Evans had
to dip into their own bank accounts to meet the
payroll. The site is still not profitable, but its backers
have deep pockets: Its fourth round of financing in
May brought in $32.5 million from companies such as
AOL, which has supported it from its start in 1995.
"We are tremendously impressed with the value of
iVillage real estate, its leadership in traffic, and the
high quality of its female demographic," said Jay
Hoag, general partner in one investor, Technology
Crossover Ventures.
When Polaroid sought parents for a special camera
promotion, iVillage turned out to be an excellent ad
buy, according to Carol Phelan, Polaroid's marketing
communications manager. iVillage delivered a
"quantifiable audience that cared about child rearing
[as measured] by click-throughs and numbers of visits
... There were multimillion hits" from online parents
who make up iVillage's interactive kitchen table,
reported Phelan. "It absolutely was a successful and
important component in our media mix."
In recent months iVillage has forged deals with such
high-traffic areas as Infoseek, Excite, Lycos,
Amazon.com, and Sportsline USA. With Quicken, it
launched a joint site -- Armchair Millionaire -- to get
women talking about money management. There are
intimations of an initial public offering within the next
year.
But growth won't get in the way of Carpenter's own
priorities. She leaves her office promptly at 6 p.m. to
have dinner with her two young daughters. Then she
goes back to work at 9:30 p.m. -- at home. Her staff of
189 follows her lead, which is why the iVillage hive of
offices in New York's Flatiron District is equipped with
laptops.
"The really good sign," notes Carpenter, "is that there
are weddings and showers galore" among her
employees. "People are finding time to have lives," she
says. "We encourage that." |
