New media
What nerve: Babble, for the new parent
By Heidi Dawley
Dec 12, 2006, 01:05

That name may not ring that many bells these days, but back before the internet meltdown Griscom was quite the talk. He is recognized as one of the true early innovators on the internet as the founder of the racy Nerve.com, a site dedicated to what he preferred to term educated smut.

His aim then was to revolutionize porn, soften it, make it prettier, capture the intelligence of it through gorgeous pictures and well-crafted storytelling, make it so that even women would come to visit and stay. He did, and they did.

Now, with Nerve well established, Griscom aims to revolutionize the parenting category with a new web site, called Babble.com, aimed at hip, urbanite parents. Babble.com launches today.

Let it be noted that Griscom is himself a new dad, which explains part of his interest. But he's also driven by the belief that the traditional print titles are ho-hum, plain-vanilla excuses for magazines. Griscom calls it a big ocean of pink and powdered blue.

"We were just amazed by the fact that the experience of being a parent is such a crucible experience, it is such an intense, challenging and extraordinary experience,” Griscom tells Media Life.

“But you get no sense of that in any of the parenting magazines or the web sites we have seen. It is presented as an interior decorating challenge or a cute cuddly experience by the industry at large.”

In Babble.com the aim is to offer parents a more intelligent and sophisticated experience, as well as humor, even irony, which you don't get much of in the traditional titles. Parents are certainly caregivers, but they are also adults, and Babble.com will address them as such.

To that end, Griscom is hiring on a slew of top writers and bloggers, including Greg Allen (Daddytypes) and Rebecca Woolf (GirlsGoneChild). In addition to articles, Babble.com will have an information center and columns, such as “Bad Parent” and “Notes from a Non-Breeder.” Babble.com will open discussions of controversial topics via personal essays.

Visitors will post video content and participate in the community, posting profiles, chatting and sharing photos.

Griscom hopes to attract as many as a couple of million visitors a month to Babble, but he allows that half a million wouldn’t be a bad start  He sees his nearest competitors as Babycenter.com and UrbanBaby.com. He's launching with four advertisers and says Babble will be in the black within six months.

“From where I sit, I think that this will be a moderate success and cash flow neutral- positive, pretty much out of the gate,” says Griscom. “The real question is, can it be a large success? That I think we will find out over the next few years.”

Griscom was first in the headlines a decade ago when he co-founded Nerve.com, and while the site hasn't gotten nearly so much press in recent years, he says he now generates significant profits, enough to fund the half-a-million-dollar start up costs of Babble.com.

Despite its content, or really because of it, Nerve has attracted an upmarket demographic--it claims that some 35 percent of its audience has graduate degrees--and a surprisingly high share of women, some 40 percent of its visitors, says Griscom.

And if he can attract women to Nerve, he reasons he'll certainly be able to attract men to Babble.com.

Others are not so sure.

“In spite of their intentions, I suspect they will attract mostly women,” says Martin S. Walker, chairman of Walker Communications, a magazine publishing consultancy. Walker observes that in magazines, audiences tend to break down as women or men, with little mixing. The main exception is news. 

But Griscom does stand a chance to shake up the parenting category.

“I don’t think any of the current parenting magazines have really captured the audience with any high degree of loyalty,” says Peter Kreisky, chairman of Kreisky Media Consultancy, who says maybe this might leave the door open for Babble to follow the example set by The Knot, the wedding site that has become No. 1 in its category.

But it will be a competitive race. Even with the internet, the parenting category has seen two new print titles, Conde Nast’s Cookie and Disney’s Wondertime, and both are gaining ad pages even as the category overall was down in November and flat for year.

Further, the existing titles are all busy building up their own internet presences. Ultimately, it may come down to who has the deeper insight into what parents really want, the old-hand publishers and editors or the new dad and purveyor of erotica.

Meanwhile, in online ratings for the week ended Dec. 3, the top five parent companies were Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Time Warner and News Corp. The top five brands were Yahoo, Google, MSN/Windows Live, Microsoft and AOL.

Gus Plc was the top advertiser with 8.13 million impressions, followed by NexTag at 4.71 million, Reunion.com at 2.44 million, Bank of America at 1.60 and Time Warner at 1.59 million.

Sessions per person soared 14.29 percent to reach 16, while domains visited per person also rose 14.29 percent to 40 coming off of a slow Thanksgiving week. PC time per person for the week was 16 hours, 44 minutes and 19 seconds.