NBC's iVillage mommying BlogHer with $5 million

BlogHer, the world's largest network of mommybloggers and women who are not mommies, has a new deal with NBC Universal: $5 million from their Peacock Equity fund, and a partnership with iVillage, the leading pastel content provider for ladies. More baby stuff and diet ads will follow at BlogHer, yes, but "we've been able to syndicate ads that make our bloggers happy," says BlogHer cofounder, Lisa Stone. Ads are just the acrylic tip of it. More »

Glam's flim-flam campaign draws NBC to compete

Give Samir Arora this much credit: The founder of Glam Media is an excellent salesman. Especially when pitching a gullible press corps. Folio is the latest to take the bait. The magazine swallows Arora's line that as an ad network, Glam deserves comparison to wholly-owned media properties. (Such as, I should mention, Jezebel.com, the women's site published by Gawker Media, the owner of Valleywag.) It's nonsense, of course. But when Deborah Fine, CEO of NBC Universal's iVillage, points this out, she's portrayed as a disgruntled rival, not a voice of reason. Too bad Folio didn't listen to her, or talk to stock analysts, or do anything, really, besides transcribe what Arora told the magazine. Brokering ads on thin margins is a rough business, and one in which Glam competes with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. And now, NBC. More »

CafeMom, a social networking site for the maternal set, was the No. 1 destination for women in October, according to ComScore. CafeMom, with 90 million pageviews, beat out other female-centric sites such as BabyCenter, NBC's iVillage, Oprah.com and MarthaStewart.com. [Mashable]

And Madison Avenue created woman

There are women on the Internet. Did you know? Madison Avenue is just figuring this out, desperately looking for websites to stuff with female-targeted ad dollars. Lifetime, the cable network, just launched its own social network, mylifetime.com, with a lot of help from Glam Media's stable of female-centric blogs. Similarly, Warner Bros. announced entertainment and advice destination Mom Logic. Martha Stewart has launched Martha's Circle, an online ad network which represents other websites, and NBC Universal's iVIllage has struck a similar deal with Sugar Publishing. "It's kind of boring to say, but we really think content's king in this category," said Starcom's Jeff Marshall to AdAge. Boring, and false. The rule these days is sell the ads first, and find a place to put them later.

Web-cable hybrid Oxygen runs out of air

What took NBC so long? That's the only question that came to mind when I saw that Geraldine Laybourne, at long last, had sold her struggling women's cable-TV channel to NBC Universal for $925 million. The fact that I'm describing it as, yes, a "cable-TV channel" speaks to Oxygen's failure. Conceived in 2000 as a multimedia empire that would bridge the Web and TV, Oxygen failed to thrive in either medium. Backer Oprah Winfrey, Laybourne disclosed to Advertising Age, quietly backed out of the venture some time ago. For NBC, Oxygen is a natural add-on, a minor expansion of its cable lineup. As for Oxygen.com, it, too, is far smaller than NBC's iVillage, which NBC has struggled to integrate. Eventually, the Peacock may figure out how to merge its disparate networks — broadcast, cable, and Web, But if it was hoping to buy a recipe for doing so from Laybourne, NBC will just be cooking up disaster.

At iVillage, NBC makes all the same mistakes

NBC has relearned, at great cost, a valuable lesson. The Web is more than the Wild West. One doesn't profit by simply squatting on land; it actually has to be developed. Beth Comstock, NBC's president of integrated media, dazzled the Net with NBC's acquisition of women's health site iVillage. She boasted how the purchase gave NBC "scale and a profitable, established platform to expand [its] digital efforts." It would allow the company to connect "more deeply online, on mobile and on demand with key consumers throughout their various life stages." Now, Comstock admits she bet wrong, to the tune of $600 million. More »

Guest post: Why NBC is buying Tribe.net

Rumors of Tribe re-hiring its founding prez, followed by news that NBC wants to buy Tribe, set Mark Rumer's mind to work about NBC's motives. The founder and CTO of Occam Networks slices his razor across the rumored deal with the following analysis. More »