For She-Bloggers, Does It Take A Village To Profit?

C|Net:

Just three years ago, she was one of “three chicks with credit cards” trying to form a consortium of female bloggers.

Now, former CNN journalist Lisa Stone is championing a network of 2,200 blogs in a fresh strategic partnership with iVillage, taking on a new $5 million investment from iVillage-parent NBC Universal, and playing host to as many as eight blog-publishing conferences this year around the country. This Friday, the BlogHer conference in San Francisco is expected to attract as many as 3,000 bloggers, some of them mothers driving across the country via caravan while blogging about their trip. (Stone co-founded BlogHer in February 2005 with Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins.)

CNET News caught up with Stone on the eve of her fourth annual BlogHer event to talk about online advertising, the presidential campaign, and what it takes to be a successful blogger.

Can you tell me why this deal with iVillage is significant?

Stone: Our mission has always been to raise the profile of women who blog, as well as create great opportunity for their economic empowerment. With this relationship, we’re excited to drive reach, scale, and additional advertising revenue for our BlogHer ad network members.

What are the terms of the deal?

Stone: Two key things are going to happen. We’re creating promotional opportunities across the different sites, from Blogher.com to iVillage.com and BravoTV.com properties, also from those sites to Blogher’s 2,200 bloggers. So No. 1 is driving the reach that these bloggers have, and the second thing is we’ll be working together to collaborate on advertising sales with NBC Universal for our inventory.

Today BlogHer reaches more than 8 million unique visitors a month, according to Nielsen NetRatings. We’re a long-tail play that achieves about 100 million impressions a month and 45 million pageviews. A year ago, we didn’t (register with) Nielsen. We had 180 blogs in our network and we thought we were achieving close to 1 million unique (visitors). We’ve grown 10 times and we’re excited to begin monetizing this network.

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