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are women the driving force behind social media?
Kylie | WomenCo. (March 31, 2008)
Today marks the launch date of Shine
(shine.yahoo.com), Yahoo’s new attempt to win over the hearts and minds
of e-women everywhere – at least, between the ages of 24 and 54.
Therefore, today also marks the trillionth attempt for a larger
internet company to attempt to shift demographics in order to cover
women’s media and women’s news.
If you take a closer look
at this trend, one way or another, you’ll run into an interested
concept: namely, that women’s media is becoming increasingly central to
the success of the mammoth internet companies. Think about it –
iVillage, Jezebel (part of the Gawker network), Yahoo Shine, Glam
Media, and Sugar Inc – which is actually comprised of 15+ smaller sites
serving women’s niche-specific interests. What is really going on here?
We’ve known for a long time that men and women spend their time differently online (there is perhaps even a physical element of this) – but we’ve never seen these differences targeted so strongly by different companies as we do today.
Without wanting to perpetuate raucous claims, it seems to me that many internet gurus are drawing the same conclusion: women are actually the driving force behind social media. Summation blogger Auren Hoffman writes:
If you are creating a new Web 2.0 site and you want to go viral, you
target women. Young women drive virality and so all the new innovation
is targeted towards them. That means that the gender gap on social
networks (and increasingly in all of social media) is only going to
widen. More and more innovation will be targeted towards women and they
will continue to get more engaged. And while we expect men’s adoption
to social media to continue to increase, it will likely be slower than
the rate of adoption by women.
If this turns out to
be true, there would be some pretty interesting implications: There is,
of course, potential for the focus on women’s issues to actually
empower women. If women’s interests and motivators become a priority
for these companies, and women’s interests continue to shift from
astrology to demands for equal wages and third-wave feminism, some of
these companies would be put in a slightly awkward situation.
But it is equally as likely that large companies will begin to quibble over
coverage of women’s issues in an entirely cut-throat and unprofessional
fashion. Already in my work on WomenCo., I have seen a great deal of
catty behavior; just last week, I was contacted by a competitor site
that re-posted several WomenCo. articles after stripping out all of the
links to our community and our bloggers. Such transgressions can waste
a good deal of time – the larger the site, the more likely lawyers will
get involved.
In today’s times, it is very surprising to see Yahoo! launching a product like Shine
without Google nipping at their heels. Will we see a fierce competition
form between the two companies – or will Google release a product which
tries to engage a more male-focused group?
Yahoo’s own comments are very interesting: “When
we started talking about creating a new website for women, we wanted to
avoid all of the common categories that advertisers or marketers tend
to put us in. We didn’t want to be a site just for moms or just for
single women or working women, or any specific demo- or psychographic.“
Yahoo plans to let Shine visitors write blog posts, and the editors will feature some of the best on the home page.
And yet, when I got to the home page of Shine, I
immediately see the following tag words: “Fashion, Beauty, Living,
Entertainment, Parenting, Love, Sex, Money, Work, Food, Home,
Astrology”.
I guess, in the end, it always circles back to What Women Want. Apparently, Yahoo’s best guess is Kate Bosworth.
Original article on WomenCo.
