Players as rich and diverse as Microsoft Corp.’s Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey are leading an on-line land rush to capitalize on the rather sudden move by American women onto the Internet.
It’s a race among America’s Information Age media giants for the buying power of women, who made up 52 percent of Internet newcomers in the past year, according to the latest polls from media analysts at the Pew Media Research Center in Washington, D.C.
The big three women-focused sites include iVillage.com, boasting a lineup of cash-heavy backers such as America Online Inc., and Women.com, backed by Microsoft. The newest upstart is Oxygen Media (Oxygen.com), led by Winfrey and Geraldine Laybourne, the founding genius behind the Nickelodeon Network. It plans to launch a group of connected Web sites this month and throughout the year, leading up to its goal for an interactive Web and cable TV network in February of 2000. All three groups focus on helping women get information quickly about everything from finances to fashion.
“It’s the best time so far to be a woman consumer,” said Kate Delhagen, an e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research, an on-line consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass. “You now have all of this information at your fingertips and you can get it from the privacy of your own home.”
It takes awhile for new Internet users to become comfortable with on-line buying, which is critical to attracting advertisers and investors for the long term. But the women’s Web sites are already gaining potency, indicated when iVillage went public March 19 at $24 a share and closed that same day at a whopping $80 per share.
Driven by high-powered CEO Candice Carpenter, former boss of the upscale merchandising arm of the QVC cable shopping service and an alumna of the Time-Life Video and Television division, iVillage is the on-line equivalent of a women’s magazine.
Started in 1995, it offers attractions such as Parent Soup and MoneyLife as well as articles on health, beauty, relationships and astrology. It incorporates uniquely Internet features such as interactive quizzes, chat groups and message boards.
“There’s a philosophical question of whether the `I am woman, hear me roar’ sites are the best way to reach women,” said Peter Krasilovsky, program director with the Kelsey Group, an Internet consulting firm in Princeton, N.J. “But one of the ways to reach women is to recognize that they are much more proactive (than men) in seeking community. iVillage has really picked up on that, and it’s done that very well.”
Nancy Evans, co-founder and editor-in-chief of iVillage, says very little was on-line for women when iVillage started out, and that was reflected in how counterintuitive the medium was to use.
“Just four years ago, only 19 percent of the people on-line were women. When I went on-line, I was hit with frustration everywhere I went,” she said. “So when we started, I wanted to make sure we didn’t have those frustrations built in, meaning I wouldn’t have to go to geek school to learn how to use this.”
The site has built a fan base with such features as its interactive pregnancy calendar, which registers a user’s due date and then provides daily updates of what is happening in her body and with the baby, Evans said. Another service, which sends shopping reminders out to women on the day they request and provides links to Web stores, also has proved popular, she said.
Providing such links could help ease women into the habit of buying on-line. Already, Internet consumer shopping enjoyed a big increase this past holiday season. For 1999, eMarketer, a research firm based in New York, is projecting $6.4 billion in consumer e-commerce revenue, up from $3.8 billion for 1998.
“I said the year 2000 would be when e-commerce takes off,” Evans said. “Women have gone from 19 percent to 50 percent (of on-line users), so we’ve reached critical mass. I made my first purchase on-line this holiday season, and I was scared to put my card number in and hit `submit.’ But my order came within two days, which is extraordinary. Now I’m hooked. It’s a time-saving device for women.”
Microsoft and Hearst Corp., too, are plowing millions into Women.com, which launched its flagship site in 1995. Women.com, starting with the idea that women are seekers of specific information as opposed to surfers, features many of the same services as iVillage and also links to Web sites by such Hearst stalwarts as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Redbook. A revitalized food channel, http://Food.Homearts.com, launched in April.
In addition to partnering with Women.com, Gates has launched Microsoft’s own woman-focused site at the complex Women.msn.com, part of the Microsoft Network Online service, reflecting women’s growing presence on the Internet.
“Women have felt discrimination in various forms over the years, so women like the Web,” Delhagen said. “They can be anonymous–J. Smith rather than Joan Smith–whether they’re applying for a mortgage, buying a car or asking health questions. Their voice will be heard equally with everyone else’s.”
Cable-TV powerhouse Laybourne is trying to combine the power of the Web with her strengths in TV. She is leading a new media company, Oxygen Media Inc., in tandem with Winfrey’s Harpo Entertainment Group. It has acquired existing Web sites such as the healthy-living site Thriveonline.com, the parenting site Momsonline.com and the full-service women’s network Electra.com, and plans to launch a new personal financial site and a high-technology site this month. In August, it plans to gain Winfrey’s popular Oprah.com site. Relationships and entertainment likely will be the focus of other sites in the future.
Plans are still evolving for how the Web sites and cable channel will work together, but they will refer to each other with complementary programming, which could be broken down according to time of day, featuring segments of comedy, drama, financial issues, news, talk and sports.
“Gerry (Laybourne) will tell you that her original idea was that men have a lot of different television outlets that serve their needs, and children do too,” said Giselle Benatar, executive producer of Oxygen.com. “It was about what the audience needs.”
Scholars are quick to note the irony of women being viewed as a fresh new target in the marketplace. Almost a century after William Randolph Hearst and his fellow fin de siecle knot of press lords targeted female consumers, Web leaders like Carpenter and Laybourne are targeting them for most of the same reasons today–women control about 70 percent of consumer spending, Laybourne says.
A leading analyst of the women’s magazine phenomenon has been Kathy Peiss, women’s history specialist and author of “Cheap Amusements,” who teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. In the early 20th Century, publishers began to grasp that women were “chief purchasing agents” for their families, she wrote, and women’s magazines such as McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal arose because of that.
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The strategy behind this, Peiss said, was summed up by an advertising expert of the time named Carl Naether: “If you are selling to women, nothing succeeds like a woman’s viewpoint in woman’s own language.”
It remains to be seen whether all of the modern ways of translating this idea succeed.
“It’s hard to take one large group and say this is a community,” says Stuart Gibbel, director of marketing for Cyber Dialogue, which provides Internet marketing information. “Whether all these sites can survive the way they were built, the market will determine that. But the need is there.”
WORTH SURFING
Beyond Oxygen.com, iVillage.com and Women.com, here’s a quick list of sites with varied content for women. Many offer links to more narrowly focused women’s sites:
– www.cybergrrl.com: Aimed at a hipper woman than the three aforementioned sites.
– www.underwire.msn.com: Service oriented, offering such features as Lucille’s Garage for car questions and pop culture quizzes.
– www.estronet.com: Having just merged with chickclick.com, it’s aimed at 20-somethings.
– www.wwwomen.com: Provides a directory of thousands of women’s sites.