Profiled: iVillage
www.ivillage.com
Chairman and CEO: Douglas W. McCormick
Number of Employees: 250
Founded: 1995
A company's good brand name relies on the trust it builds with its customers. Trust keeps them loyal and helps inform the company of what the customers truly want. When the company's primary product is the content on a Web site, trust and community become primary elements in determining the most effective and appropriate content.
Content on a Web site is most powerful when it hits the bull's-eye of the visitors' interests. When those visitors share common values and concerns and are provided the means to interact online, they form communities that respond to the content and—through their digital conversations—create their own original content. My 17 years of working with online communities have shown me that women are especially active when provided with such conversational opportunities, and the most successful women-oriented Web site today is iVillage.
Roots in Community
Founded in 1995, iVillage has adopted at least four different Web business models over its 7-year lifespan. It began as an advertising-supported community site; then it tried ecommerce, to sell to a demographic known to make 70% of household purchasing decisions. Last year, iVillage acquired its biggest rival, Women.com, and today it's experimenting with the paid subscription model, attempting to leverage what it has learned about its members' interests to provide them with a service worth paying for. As a site that serves the interests of women, iVillage provides plenty of topical content, but also fosters online conversation among its members, producing what Kellie Gould calls "some of the most compelling content that we have on the site."
Business Changes. Trust is Constant
In my interview with Kellie Gould, iVillage's senior vice president for programming, I asked her how a company that has been through so many changes over seven years is handling the introduction of paid services in light of the Web's history of free content. "We're sort of testing the waters," she says, and their first effort—an online self-help course called "Awaken Your Sexual Self: Six Weeks to Increase Your Sex Drive"—has so far brought an enthusiastic response from its subscribers who, Gould says, have been motivated by the course "to figure out what's going on in their lives." iVillage claims that over 1,600 people signed up to take the course for a fee of $34.95. In providing interactive content around such a sensitive subject, trust is essential between the content provider and the paying consumer.
"Women know that they can trust us," Gould says, "and that's been a tenet of iVillage for so long—that we are a safe, well-lit community. So when we offer things like this…I think they're more willing to pay because they trust iVillage." The content they pay for, in this case, is provided by an expert sexologist who leads them through a different aspect of the course each week. But the private message board allows the paying participants to enhance the valued content by, as Gould describes it, "sharing so many solutions and really solid advice with each other."
A Closer Look
In a study iVillage conducted to find out how users felt about the company's brand, they discovered what their annual report described as, "some stunning facts, facts that you won't hear from any other Internet site." Of the respondents to their study, 93 percent found the iVillage site to be both useful and relevant. Over three out of four agreed with the statement, "iVillage is truly unique compared to other Web sites." Eighty percent reported that iVillage is a place they trust online. It seems likely that iVillage is banking on leveraging that user confidence to transfer that trust to products and companies advertised on their site.
There are about 250 employees working for iVillage, and of those about 25 percent are directly involved in content production. Gould includes among them a small staff with community-related responsibilities. In tallying the community activities, she says, "we have about 3,000 message boards, about 900 weekly hosted chats, and we have roughly 2,500 'community leaders'," referring to the member-volunteers who help guide the variety of message boards and chats on the site. iVillage also contracts about 30 of what it calls "community managers" who maintain and coordinate the interactive forums. In describing the mix of content sources on the site, Gould says, "We don't do a lot of classical freelance writing because it's very expensive. We've found that a better mix for us—and what our visitors are looking for—is to have a blend of community content, expert content, and what I would call 'acquired' content." The site's most effective acquired content are book excerpts that are used—with permissions obtained from publishers—to stimulate conversation and learning. Gould described a "content module" called Workshops for Women that uses book excerpts as the core structure of free, step-by-step courses about parenting, work, and relationships.
Clearly, iVillage's content strategy is tied tightly to its community-related history and activities. The longer any community is around, the less time its members need to spend settling in and getting familiar with one another. Their attention shifts to their environment, in this case, the iVillage site, and they spend more time collaborating to improve it for themselves and for others who might join them. Communities are not static; they learn and evolve. They—and their members—also mature. I asked Gould, as the head of programming, what attracts the audience to iVillage today and how it might change over time.