Crain article on digital sites geared for women shows segmentation is essential for savvy business online

Today many online communities court women for lifestyle and consumer interests

Crain's New York had a great recent article on online media properties and the increase competition among online women communities. The article focused on the relaunch or iVillage -- NBC is attempting to make a portfolio of brands -- as well as Glam Media's continued dominance.  From the article:

"Magazine publishers are also getting better at identifying audiences across their networks of sites and delivering them in big numbers, media buyers say. Hearst Digital Media's network had 17.6 million visitors in February, comScore reports, and Conde Nast Digital had 15.3 million"

These are just the opening salvos -- Glam Media has the largest number of unique visitors at 78.0 million (comScore figure).  All hail from the "fragmentation of audiences and the way people now use search engines to travel around the Web."    You can read more at Crain's New York (Site has a thing or 2 for Women)

Takeaways for small businesses:

• Business owners must pay attention to the different sites/properties available to their business, and see if there is an audience that rings true to their goals -- to strengthen its position in a market or even extend its audience (long tail).
• In paying attention, businesses should decide what services and features to focus on the most -- the fragmentation that is occurring has made being a jack-of-all-trades a very expensive proposition to maintain.  The cost for marketing to as much traffic as possible may exceed the revenue generated.   See the Zimana blog articles on segmentation and the Orient express as well as the post on the Lexus LF-A launch for examples of how large organizations deal (or not deal) with segmentation.
• In focusing on a segment, the marketing dollars and effort will be better focus and can yield better results for campaigns and attracting the right visitors who will convert.