• by February 17, 2006

IT TAKES AN iVILLAGE - The financial press are all a-blather over the fact that yet another Internet property is on the block, but seems to be having trouble attracting suitors willing to sustain supposed online market valuations. Ironically, that property, late 1990s start-up iVillage, is currently trading at just under $8 a share, giving it a market capitalization of about $560 million. Even a reasonable take-out premium over that would be a sweet deal by March 19, 1999 standards, when iVillage began trading on Nasdaq with an initial public offering priced at $24 a share. But this column isn't about how iVillage managed to lose two-thirds of its market value over the course of seven years. Plenty of dot-darlings were overvalued and came crashing down. And unlike many of them, iVillage at least is still in business.

A lot of credit should go to Doug McCormick, the long-time cable TV salesman turned cable TV boss at Lifetime, who jumped ship to compete with it as CEO of iVillage. Despite iVillage's market wobblizations, McCormick has stayed true to its course, and focused on building the Internet destination as the premier online community for women. The real question is who should actually acquire iVillage.

Both GE's NBC Universal and Time Warner's America Online units have stakes in iVillage and are considered candidates, though both are also likely suitors for a much bigger prize: Spanish-language media giant Univision, which is valued at $10 billion.

Hearst Corp. owns a 25 percent stake in iVillage, and the women's portal also has close ties to an even bigger portal: Yahoo. Women's magazine publisher Hachette Filipacchi would also seem like a logical home. You know, sisters unite?

But as logical as these companies may seem, there is an even more logical fit: Walt Disney Co., whose Lifetime Entertainment division is the ideal TV counterpoint to iVillage's online reach. Heck, it would be like going home for McCormick. And Hearst also is a big stakeholder in Lifetime.

Here's how it will actually play out. After he completes his creeping takeover of Walt Disney Co., Apple byter Steve Jobs' first order of business will be to acquire iVillage. He won't actually merge it with Lifetime. Instead, he'll fuse it with Apple's iPod division to create a new company called iPillage.

Jobs' second order of business will be to call for a digital remastering of Disney classic "Snow White," in which the wicked witch's poison apple is replaced by a Windows operating system.