Four million babies are born in the U.S. every year. Hence the interest of two ecommerce portals in local baby sites. Just last week, Urban Baby.com, an email-oriented baby care tip sheet, was sold to CNET, and LilaGuides, a print-oriented local baby guide that features user reviews, was sold to The Knot, the marriage-oriented ecommerce portal.
UrbanBaby is currently in seven markets, with a special emphasis on New York City. But it has plans on the drawing boards to enter 19 more. LilaGuides sells its pocket-sized print guides for 23 markets, and has collected 32,000 Zagat-style reviews in those markets. The guides list for $16.95, but are provided for free in many markets if parents submit 10 + reviews. While LilaGuides only uses online to collect reviews, it expects to ramp up its online platform.
Both sites feature local content, but haven’t really established local sales channels. With deeper pockets, and possible integration into existing content –the Knot has city/regional guides in key U.S. markets — we’d expect to see both partner with local media and commerce companies to fully leverage the local component.
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.
C|Net’s acquisition of urbanbaby.com isn’t all that odd, especially considering that the mom market represents [url=http://www.bsmmedia.com/resources/marketresearch.php]$1.6 Trillion[/url] in purchasing power each year. But the company’s buy into the “mom space” wasn’t the first. On [url=http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060706005612&newsLang=en]July 5, 2006[/url], the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel purchased [url=http://www.milwaukeemoms.com]MilwaukeeMoms.com[/url], 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; [b] it was by relationship. [/b] We do what the overwhelming majoprity of marketers and advertisers neglect to do: 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 mom’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
I couldn’t agree more with Pat McKenna’s experience-laden comment about success for content-and-community-centric local verticals. When done well, these services will help identify, organize and complement conversations that are already going on among local vertical communities.