Peter Krasilovsky at The Local Onliner discusses the recent acquisition of baby oriented websites by wedding site TheKnot and CNET:
The Knot’s interest in a baby site makes sense to me. It is a logical extension. What CNET is ultimately going to do with a baby site past tech reviews of baby monitors, however, is kind of confounding.
Even though CNET’s demographics skew male, baby sites are going to be frequented by online moms. Online moms are a desirable and potent e-commerce segment and are the users of many of the social-directory sites. According to data aggregator eMarketer:
Mothers make up approximately one-third of the female online population, which continues to grow at a faster rate than the male online population. According to eMarketer, there were 90 million females online in the US last year, compared with 85.4 million males. An estimated 62.3% of the US female population goes online.
These women use social media, control billions in spending power and they buy. CNET is trying to diversify its audience and go after a segment that is increasingly important to ecommerce.
Screenwerk 
August 2, 2006 at 4:04 pm
C|Net’s acquisition of urbanbaby.com isn’t all that odd, especially considering that mom market represents $1.6 Trillion in purchasing power each year. But the company’s buy into “mom space” wasn’t the first. On July 5, 2006, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel purchased MilwaukeeMoms.com, a parenting resource site that my wife and I co-founded in 2002 to serve parents like us raising children under six-years-old. Our exponential growth –driven entirely by word of mouth advertising among metro mothers — wasn’t by chance; it was by relationship. We do what the overwhelming majoprity of marketers and advertisers neglect: speak to mothers in a language that imparts respect for the challenges of their daily life, structuring content around the narrow windows of time they deal with in managing the affairs of house and children. As any parent knows, satisfying a toddler can be a vexing endeavor that requires Mom to fill windows as narrow as 5 minutes. There simply isn’t time for leisurely brand comparisons or listening to an array of dumbed down, stereotypic pitches for everyday staples. By necessity they will return to products, places and Web sites that make their lives “just a little bit easier.”
Whether or not C|Net can make the transition from servicing geeks to serving moms will turn on its ability to have an intimate understanding of a momn’s life and to strike up a sincere dialogue with them in the cities UrbanBaby.com represents and to impart real value into their lives. One thing’s for certain: sticking with UB’s cookiecutter design will yield limited results. To serve the mom niche, local content and local voices are required, and that’s where newspapers and local publications have a significant edge. — Pat McKenna
August 4, 2006 at 6:07 pm
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