FEEDBURNER
Val Landi's Weblog, Thursday April 6
I've been following the recent acquisition of iVillage, the woman's social network, these past couple of weeks (it sold to NBC Universal for a cool $750 million). I'm familiar with iVillage because we considered them a competitor of sorts when I joined the founding team at the search directory and Yahoo competitor LookSmart in '98.
Web media is suddenly getting lots of attention from our older media brethren. Last June, Viacom, parent of MTV and CBS, bought the kids’ gaming site NeoPets for $160 million. A month later, Rupert Murdock's News Corp.,owners of Fox and the War in Iraq, scooped up teen ghetto MySpace for $580 million.
A common feature of all these purchases is an aura of urgent desperation: the old-centralized media giants are scared.
We are all spending more time at our keyboards than with our remote controls, and advertisers are rapidly following us onto the Net. I can't remember the last time I watched a morning TV news program or even bought a morning paper.
Prime-time network audiences are down 35 percent in the past ten years. Bob Wright, NBC’s chairman, has been quoted saying that reaching viewers preoccupied with the Web is taking on a certain urgency. “There aren’t that many growing, independent Web sites," he was quoted, "that have picked up a large audience. Pretty soon, there won’t be any left.”
My sense is the growth of social networks as media platforms will follow what has been an almost Darwinian Law of media: the evolution from broad to specific, from mass to personal, from centralized content creation to distributed user-generated media, from paid to free, micro-chunked content.
IVillage is a perfect petrie dish cultural specimen: it attempts to appeal to all levels of women's interest, with a powerful undertow towards the downscale, lower demographic: more Cosmo and Family Circle than Vogue. I would imagine that many highly educated, sophisticated women find some of the topics offensive and tired, especially the standard-issue sex quizzes, celebrity gossip, astrology, makeovers, and the like. I'm kind of stunned by the number of links, but I also find navigating them confusing....it's not a restful or inviting place to hang out.
I think what we'll see in all categories is the rise of special interest social networks as a powerful new media format (much in the same way that Bill Ziff ushered in special interest magazines back in the '60's with titles on Yachting, Backpacking, Fly fishing).
The specific will drive out the general. As Google has shown so brilliantly, it's a granular world.
Realtime Publishers Social Media iVillage NBC Universal MySpace LookSmart Yahoo
Comments