You GO, Girls!

American Demographics, Jan, 1999 by Helene Stapinski

The Girls On Network knows what clicks with young women online.

For cyberpioneer Dan Pelson, acquiring the tiny Girls On Film Web site in 1997 and raising its online visibility could have backfired in a big way. Instead of hitting more of the site's target audience--women interested in film reviews and other pop culture subjects--he risked drawing in men looking for a quick thrill.

"It could have turned out that we reached 35-year-old men because they thought it was Girls On ..." Pelson trails off, laughing. "Well, whatever." A Web site with photos of naked girls could have made a lot more money, he admits, blushing, "but that was not our interest."

Reaching 18-to-34-year-old women was. In 1996, Pelson, president and founder of New York City-based Concrete Media, a company that builds Internet-based media brands, began searching for a Web property to appeal to young women. Surveys indicated that this age group was logging on in increasing numbers, but Pelson believed there were few places for them to congregate online. It was certainly a potentially lucrative niche worth mining: According to Mediamark Research, women 18-to-34 spend $3.6 billion a year on health and beauty products, representing 31 percent of all sales in the category. They also drop $12 billion a year on clothes, nearly 20 percent of total sales.

Enter Lise Carrigg, then a 27-year-old New York University film studies graduate. As a class project, Carrigg had created the Girls on Film (GOF) site in 1994, enlisting the aid of three friends to write film reviews and spout off about "chicks, flicks, politicks"--the site's motto.

The girls reflected their own target audience: female twentysomethings with brains who were looking for movie recommendations from critics they could relate to. Reviews and casual commentary on everything from bad-hair days to movie theaters that serve beer resonated with readers. On a good day, the site--whose name is a sarcastic nod to the cheesy Duran Duran song of the same title--racked up to 5,000 page views.

But at the end of the day, the site didn't pay the bills. "I hadn't eaten very well in two years," says Carrigg, who found herself, resume in hand, seated before Pelson in the winter of '97. At the time Pelson was hiring for concrete and was starting up a project called Bolt that would later become a premiere Web site for teens. When Pelson asked the usual interviewer opener--"tell me about yourself"--Carrigg gushed on and on about GOF. "This was obviously her passion," Pelson recalls.

A few weeks later, Pelson and Carrigg were in negotiations over concrete acquiring the GOF site. Pelson did his homework before signing the check. He ran a few focus groups to test the site's potential, but relied mostly on online surveys to gauge audience interest. Surveys asked about the user's demographics, lifestyle, and habits, such as how many movies they watched in a typical week. "Focus groups are good for getting general stuff, but ultimately, if you ask 10,000 people some questions on the Internet, that's more valuable to me," Pelson says.

The surveys confirmed Pelson's hunch: GOF's audience, with its core group between 18 and 25, was looking for a place of their own on the Web. Two months after meeting Carrigg, Pelson completed the deal (he's mum on how much he paid), and Carrigg found herself behind a desk at Concrete as an executive producer--"which was kind of funny," she recalls, "since there was nobody else there. I was in charge of me, basically." Soon, Carrigg hired GOF's three cofounders, who all still write for the site: 30-year-old Clare Bundy works out of Los Angeles as the site's editor; Sibyl Goldman, 28, is a part-time writer/consultant, as is Carrigg, now 29; Dre Pyros, 28, came on full time last May after finishing graduate school and now works as an executive producer based in New York.

While Carrigg and company concentrated on the creative, Pelson worked on attracting more young women to the site, taking a mass-market approach. Four months after acquiring the site, he established a deal with Yahoo! that allowed the popular search engine's users to connect directly to GOF via a link on the Yahoo homepage. Similar deals were inked with AOL, Netscape and Hotmail. Hits to the site quadrupled. Of course, not every first-time visitor was an 18-to-34-year-old woman, Pelson says, but the viewers who liked the content, bookmarked the page and kept coming back were.

Content was expanded as well. Sections on television and books were established, as was a new name: Girls On Network (www.girlson.com). A feature called "GO Notes" brought instant messaging to registered members. Today, nearly two years into the venture, the site has 100,000 members and averages five million page views per month. One such member is Thisbe Lynne Sauvage, 33, from Denver, Colorado. Sauvage says she logs on to GO everyday, often to check her GO Notes and catch up on the latest content updates. "It's wonderful to finally have a place to express opinions about movies and books that I love," she explained in a GO Note. "{GO} is informative, and smart-assy."