Commentary

Womensforum Serving Up Content Based On Device, Behavior Patterns

With deep apologies to the ghost of Sigmund Freud: What do specific women want? The Web site Womensforum.com intends to answer that.

It’s now going wide with modifications to its CMS operation, working with JWPlayer, so that it will be able to suggest content based specifically on a woman’s viewing habits gleaned from past behavior at the site’s 2,000 platform affiliate sites.

It will also modify the offerings based on whether the user is on a mobile device of tablet, and will even change choices based on the time of day.  

Smartphone and tablet users will generally get shorter bursts of content--the snackable menu programmers like to talk about as they aim to meet the uptick in mobile usage.

Ads will be delivered that way too, and Womensforum setting frequency caps, so that visitors don’t see the same thing over and over. The site limits that to seeing the same ad no more than three times in a 24 hour period; this is a big deal with consumers, and also with advertisers. Not surprisingly, chances you’ll stick around to watch a video and ad increase tremendously if you haven’t seen that pre-roll endlessly.

Mark Kaufman CEO of Womensforum, doesn’t seem surprised, but he does seem fascinated to discover from the beta tests of “the different patterns of usage during different times of the day.” For example, showbiz and gossip material does well in morning hours and so do some food recipe features, just like you’d suppose. But seeing that hunch played out is fascinating, and useful.

Womensforum is a pretty mainstream site---it’s no Jezebel.com, to be sure--that streams some 50 million videos a month. It's been around since 1996--ancient!--when Kaufman and co-founder Jodi Luber figured carving out a women's site early on would be smart strategy. Its topics range from parenting to food to fashion shopping to do-it-yourself projects, like how to build a new closet, which is a project its video tied in to Home Depot.

Based in Chicago, it claims 35 million or so regular visitors. Straightforward, no-nonsense, and kind of down-to-brass-tacks, Womensforum is the kind of site whose users would seem to be in the market for a playlist that cuts out the fat.   

“What’s fun is that it’s not like some mad scientist. It’s just paying attention to the data about media consumption,” Kaufman says. “Advertisers want that kind of information, and we can provide it at scale.”

pj@mediapost.com

 

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