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Female net users want it all – from politics to parenting

July 2008

Misty Harris , Canwest News Service
Published: Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The Internet’s digital footprint is looking more like a stiletto every day.

Community-based women’s websites are now tied with political sites as the fastest growing category online, according to comScore Media Metrix. Add that to Ad Age’s recent finding that women are now outpacing men in their Internet use and it’s clear why major media companies, venture capitalists and advertisers are scrambling to answer that age-old question of what women want.

Hint: it’s a lot more complex than recipes and romance.

The online estrogen revolution, which is attracting an increasing number of prominent women, has community-based and conventional websites directed at a female audience vying to be first with news and insight on topics of every stripe, from maternity leave and the age of consent to sexual politics, entertainment and the deity that is Brangelina.
In the last five months alone, major online women’s launches have come from the Wall Street Journal Online (Journal Women), Yahoo (Shine) and an alpha- female collective including TV journalist Leslie Stahl, former Simon & Schuster president Joni Evans, and actresses Lily Tomlin, Candice Bergen and Whoopi Goldberg (wowOwow, short for Women on the Web).
“In the best-case scenario, they will have at least some pieces here and there that take very seriously women’s expertise, women’s opinions and feminist politics within the context of world issues,” says Jennifer Pozner, founder and director of the advocacy group Women In Media & News (WIMN).

“On the negative side, you have way more focus on fashion, celebrity and lifestyle, and the idea becomes, `Let’s put all the fluff into one online section.”’

According to a 2008 Compass Partners/BlogHer study, 36.2 million women in the United States actively participate in the blogosphere every week – 15.1 million are publishing and 21.1 million are reading blogs and commenting.

Among the influential participants are Feministing’s Jessica Valenti, who touches on feminist icons, purity balls and abortion, among other topics, and the collective of Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins, who as founders of BlogHer – backed by the venture-capital firm Venrock – are striving to amplify the voices of women on the web.
Advertisers are paying attention: BlogHer’s CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) ads sell for $10 to $12 on average, on the higher end of the industry scale. CPM Advisors LLC estimates the average online CPM in 2007 was $1.15.

Looking at the potential for influence and income, it’s not hard to see why so many women are joining what the New York Times recently dubbed the digital “slumber party.”
According to a study by Magid Associates, people are more than twice as likely to remember an online ad than one seen on TV. That 54 to 22 per cent ratio is leveraged by sites such as ABC.com to charge higher rates for online video than the parent network charges for a TV ad. (But a TV ad still brings in greater revenue because of its larger audience).
In Canada, eMarketer projects annual spending on online advertising will surpass $3 billion by 2011- roughly triple its value in 2006.

Pozner says “empowering women” has become, for many sites, the fast track to attracting new revenue from advertisers.
“New media knows that women are a very lucrative online audience, the financial breadth of which has not been reached,” she says.

In 2005, Statistics Canada reported that 68 per cent of Canadian women were Internet users. Last year, an eMarketer report estimated women would by 2008 comprise 51.8 per cent of all U.S. Internet users, with huge strides having been made between 2000 and 2006: the percentage of women who were online climbed 12 per cent, from 66 per cent to 78 per cent, while men saw a three-per- cent gain during that same period, moving from 74 per cent to 77 per cent.

It adds up to a hugely tempting business opportunity seized upon by such high-profile content providers as Salon (Broadsheet), The Daily Mail (Femail), Gawker Media (Jezebel), NBC Universal (iVillage), and Slate (XX Factor), and Chatelaine.com, which operates one of the longest-running online women’s communities in Canada.

Journal Women editor Francesca Donner says efforts are being made not to ghettoize women’s concerns or voices.

“These (issues), although they revolve around women, are also extremely relevant for men,” says Donner. She notes one of the section’s family oriented blogs draws as many comments from men as it does from women.

“We really wanted to create a place that was comfortable for both sexes.”

The first newspaper-based women’s pages were created in 1894 to court female consumers. Originally dubbed “purse pages,” they survived until the first wave of feminist sentiment compelled editors to rethink their coverage.

“The idea of getting rid of the women’s pages (in the early ’70s) was that women’s news should be front-page news,” says Pozner. “It shouldn’t be shunted to one section of the paper.”

But the non-gendered “lifestyle” sections that took the place of the women’s pages focused almost solely on the four F’s – fashion, food, furnishings and family – to the exclusion of stories on serious issues.

“We still haven’t shifted in any significant, large-scale way from the idea of hard news being presumptively a male interest and `soft news’ being female interest,” says Pozner.
By way of example, she cites Mark Willes, then-publisher of the Los Angeles Times, declaring in 1998 that attracting women readers was a simple matter of making stories “more emotional, more personal, less analytical.”

But community-based websites have been quick to tackle topics of interest to women that demand attention and analysis. GimpGirl is an online community for women with disabilities. Better Than a Playdate operates as a collaborative blogzine for Canadian mothers. WIMN’s Voices is a community site authored by 50 women bloggers who address current cultural, political and social headlines from a female perspective.

And Webgrrls International acts as an online mecca for professional women interested in networking, job searches and industry news.

As for the question of what women want, it seems the answer is they want it all – the politics and the pantyhose.

“It is very challenging, I’ll be honest,” says Journal Women’s Donner. “But really whether it’s a style piece or a very serious business piece, people are just very excited to have a place where they can network and talk about things.”

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