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…
Random House chief Peter Olson will step down in the next few weeks, according to an unsourced report posted to the New York Times website. An illness—said by Publishers Weekly to be double pneumonia—had left the publishing exec "distracted and unavailable" for months. Olson, who has five children including two…
Forty people (twice as many as originally thought)An iVillage spokesperson "can confirm for you that 13 employees were affected today" by layoffs at the NBC subsidiary, not the larger number we reported earlier based on employee accounts. "Nobody saw it coming," an insider told us. Editor-in-chief Jennie Baird, who…
We hear axes are falling at iVillage, the women's-oriented media company bought by NBC Universal two years ago for $600 million. According to a source, the company "just cut about 20 positions, some of them occupied. Maybe a dozen people got the axe." Adding insult to injury, the poor employees left standing are…
Glam, the West Coast network of fashion blogs and other women's sites, is the fastest growing company on the face of the Earth, says its backer. Or else the startup, an increasingly worrying competitor of established media companies such as Hearst and NBC Universal's iVillage, is merely metastasizing, argues…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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.
