Year in Review: The Female Web

(MoneyWatch)  The web sprang to life as a virtual fantasy world for geeks, most of whom were young adult males (YAMS).

But geeks come in all shapes, sizes, ages and genders, so a business plan built exclusively on the stereotypical geek is self-limiting its ability to scale. And since for a media site, scale is one of the key factors to achieving profitability, it's never a good idea to turn potential audience segments away.

Take Digg, for example. It grew so rapidly as a social news and bookmarking service that expectations for its ability to continue on an upward trajectory failed to account for its unnecessary and self-imposed limit to growth -- it appealed almost exclusively to YAMS.

Some women, for example, found the discussion threads at best juvenile and at worst outright hostile, much as almost all of the early discussions bards were in Web 1.0.

Generalists yearned for better coverage of non-tech topics.

To Digg's credit, the company has aggressively tried to correct these content and gender imbalances, and the jury is out as to whether to can transform its brand into a friendlier, gentler Digg or not.

Also in the early years of the web, there were conscious efforts to serve the expanding female audience online, as well as sites devoted to African-Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and other subsets of the large community audience that most successful mass media companies have traditionally relied on.

Few of these sites survived dot.bomb, however.

As for Web 2.0, we have covered Glam's rise here, and Yahoo's eentry, Shine, as well as Spleak, and various other female-oriented networks and niche sites. What strikes me as significant about the current business moment for these sites is how robust the product lines for sale online have become.

With the important exception of buying gadgets, which has always been the main advertising appeal of YAMS, women typically make far more purchasing decisions than do males, therefore are appealing to a much wider range of advertisers.

Thus, in addition to the sites mentioned above, there are some new players emerging on the scene as 2008 draws to a close. Here is a roundup of some of the newer competitors for female eyeballs online:

• Slate.com is expanding its women's blog, The XX Factor.
• TheFrisky.com.
• Wowowow.com, which targets women over 40.
• Momocrats, which is a site for progressive bloggers and micro-bloggers.
• Moms Like Me is a national network that focuses on organizing groups of women in local media markets.

All of this activity again raises but does not answer the question whether a niche media site can become sustainably profitable, of course. From a strictly advertising perspective, the female sites would seem to have better potential than the YAMS-oriented sites. Beyond that, we'll have to await the new year to evaluate which companies will be able to continue the search for that successful business model that has proven to be all too elusive.