Reaching Niche Audiences: The Mommy Ecosphere
Posted on | April 28, 2009 | 6 Comments
By MaryLou Roberts
A few days ago the topic of ‘mommy blogs’ came up in conversation. I first became aware of moms writing blogs when my daughter was home with her first baby. Mommy blogs weren’t a feature of motherhood when my children were young, but I remembered the impact of being transported from a busy professional life to a period of being an at-home mom. Definitely a culture shock!
Add to that the fact many young mothers don’t have an extended family nearby to offer the knowledge and support they provided in previous generations. Young mothers often have to develop their own support networks. Consequently it’s no surprise that vibrant online ecosystem has developed to provide an important source of information and emotional support to mothers of babies and young children.
I looked around and found that the ecosystem is more complex than I realized. These are its main features:
The mommy blogs themselves. Since that’s a descriptive term that’s grown up around this activity, it certainly isn’t definitive. When I Google the term, I get over 500 thousand hits. When I search Technorati for the term in the blog URL, I get almost 13,000 hits. Exact numbers are questionable, and how many are currently active even more so. But clearly there are a lot! Characteristics of these blogs include:
- Originally, many of the blogs appeared to be the product of work-at-home moms, and there’s quite a bit of evidence that they are still an important constituency. Ads on blogs often offer work from home opportunities.
- Many of the current blogs are simply to communicate with friends and family.
- Many others say they are individual or family efforts, but they have ads and other evidence of a money-making enterprise.
- When you use various related search terms, the paid ad for PayPerPost.com often appears. This is one of the sites that that pays bloggers for postings about brands. This site does have a disclosure policy, necessary to comply with FTC rules. I’d encourage marketers who are considering this kind of activity to worry about the transp arency of paid blogging and possible backlash.
‘Mommy portals’. thought I had invented that term; turns out there’s a site by that name that targets the work-at-home mom. It doesn’t takelong to find that there are other portal-type sites:
- There is at least one directory, The Mom Blogs has commercial elements.
- There is at least one network for mommy blogs, openly a commercial venture.
- Maya’s Mom was initially funded by investors and purchased by J&J’s Baby Center.
- CafeMom is a social network for moms, also established with venture capital funding.
- Some of these sites are open about their commercial heritage; the background of others is hard to ferret out.
There are probably more but these are the ones that keep popping up. They all have significant traffic, but a compete profile shows CafeMom to have the largest and fastest-growing stream of traffic.
This investigation has uncovered a clear pattern. The original mommy blogs were what blogs are meant to be – personal records of mothers, children and families. They began to connect with one anothers similar content, offline friendships, intentional reaching out whatever the reasons, a community grew up.
When that happens, the markers will not be far behind. The directories/portals/networks either began as or became commercial ventures. They provide a window into a large and important marketspace.
Two questions:
1. Is there more to this ecosystem than just the two elements I’ve uncovered?
2. How do marketers take advantage of it?
We’d be interested in your help in describing ‘the mommy ecosystem.’
I’ll work on question 2 in my next post.
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6 Responses to “Reaching Niche Audiences: The Mommy Ecosphere”
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May 5th, 2009 @ 11:12 am
I’m doing a research project right now on why moms blog. I’ll tell you, from my preliminary findings, there are all sorts of reasons why moms blog.
And yes, because these moms have such a large and loyal readership, brands and advertisers are trying to figure out how to tap into these influential moms.
I’ll look forward to part 2 in your next post.
May 6th, 2009 @ 5:29 am
Thanks, Holly! I look forward to reading about your research!
May 7th, 2009 @ 1:58 pm
[…] numbers I quoted in part 1 of this series paint a fascinating picture of young mothers connected to one another by technology and common […]
May 13th, 2009 @ 10:30 am
[…] to reach these markets. That’s true of even large ones, like the young mothers described in part 1 of this series. There are too many other users who share the demographics but not the interests and lifestyles. […]
June 10th, 2009 @ 9:35 am
[…] Dr. Mary Lou Roberts As I recounted in the first post in this series, I originally became fascinated with mommy blogs by watching my daughter, a new mother at the time. […]
January 25th, 2010 @ 8:59 am
[…] Every so often I get energized to write a post on moms on the web. I’ve done Mommy bloggers—who they are, how to reach them, and the importance of transparency. The latter was before the FTC proposed […]