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http://women.on.the.web
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September 24, 1996: 5:55 p.m. ET
Advertisers, companies are beginning to tap the female Internet audience
From Correspondent Fred Katayama
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - The Internet has long been hyped as a boy's club, but a growing number of women are going on line, and some major companies are trying to tap this new market segment.
Clinique is one company jumping onto the Web wagon in a big way.
Marketing representatives in department stores have been distributing free software kits to entice women onto Clinique's web site.
(1.67M QuickTime Movie) Over the past three months, traffic on the site has nearly doubled.
"We think (the effort) has great power in terms of being able to drive business in stores and perhaps drive sales," said Clinique's Angela Kapp. "Over 7,000 people have come to our counters because of having this information available on the Internet."
The increased Internet-marketing efforts come as more and more women are getting wired.
Today, nearly one third of Internet users are women, compared to just 5 percent in 1994.
Katrina Santos, a junior at New York's Columbia University, relies heavily on the Web for her scholastics.
"Half of my classes have home pages," she said. "You can get assignments from it. ... You can pretty much not go to class, get stuff off the Web and still get a pretty good grade."
Some researchers predict that by the year 2000, women will comprise nearly 50 percent of all on-line users.
As the Net's female audience grows, Web advertisers are beginning to focus on women.
Industry tracker Jupiter Communications reports that in revenue terms, three of the Web's top 35 advertising sites are aimed at women.
Web surfer Mimi Ilano, another Columbia junior, said many Web ads "are more women-friendly than (they) used to be. There aren't as many young blonde models in bikinis."(165K WAV) (165K AIF)
Yet for the most part, advertisers are still experimenting.
In June, the top three women's sites generated just $329,000 in advertising revenue.
"The Procter & Gambles, the cosmetics players and packaged goods players which you typically think of as the women-advertiser market are not there yet," Jupiter Communications President Gene De Rose said. "They're starting to dabble, but for now, (Web advertising) still tends to be a broader consumer world of banks (or) automobiles." (319K WAV) (319K AIF).
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