Does anyone want to be a content creator anymore?
Women’s lifestyle site SheKnows has jumped into the user-generated content fray by buying BlogHer, which provides a technology platform for bloggers as well as opportunities to monetize. SheKnows paid an estimated $30 million-$40 million,
The acquisition fits with SheKnows’ recent efforts to turn its community into content creators, instead of just focusing on editorial content. Its “Experts Among Us” platform puts blogging hats on more than 500 members of the community, giving them a space to blog their views within SheKnows.com.
BlogHer adds 30 million monthly uniques to SheKnows’ 45 million monthly uniques. The company bought StyleCaster in August, which added 3 million uniques to SheKnows’ total.
SheKnows will add scale to its sponsored content business as it goes after the market for millennial women.
“We both have a strong imprint in branded content,” said SheKnows CEO Philippe Guelton. “SheKnows has always been at the forefront, with 75% of our business tied to some kind of sponsored, custom content creation for brands. It’s similar on the BlogHer side.”
SheKnows plans to leverage BlogHer’s platform, InfluenceHer360, across the entire business. The platform predicts how much traffic a sponsored post could bring. An advertiser looking for influencers can find potential matches through the platform.
“It guarantees engagement and total reach, including through social amplification, for an advertiser,” Guelton said.
The platform functions end to end, allowing for onboarding and management of content creators as well as performance tracking.
SheKnows’ strategy bears some comparison to the multichannel networks that have thrived by collecting like-minded content creators on YouTube.
“There’s overlap when you talk about specifically about the bloggers, who are entrepreneurs,” Guelton said. “Video is also part of our strategy, and is going to be a big push. The difference is where bloggers and YouTubers are building their own following and their own brands, our ‘Experts Among Us‘ is a community of content creators that is less about building a media brand, and more about pushing a cause or strong opinion” through exposure to the SheKnows platform.
While the BlogHer network has 3,000 blogs and 17,000 social profiles, its sponsored content monetization is small. According to a blog post by BlogHer CEO Lisa Stone, the platform paid out $36 million to 5,700 bloggers over a period of five years. That number does not include BlogHer’s take of the advertising spend.
The first step post-acquisition will be bringing all the content creators onto the InfluenceHer platform. The company will also focus on integrating sales and marketing teams to “better serve the needs of clients and brands,” Guelton said.
Further down the road, SheKnows will take steps to understand its 21,000 content creators, 75 million unique viewers, and the 147 million social media follows. “We have a wealth of information about our followers and content creators, but we still have a lot of work to do to structure and organize it,” Guelton said.
