Disney Launches Family.com
Important Details: This week Disney announced it is launching Family.com, aiming to be a one-stop resource for parents — especially moms — on the web. It’s an ambitious product, resonating with most of the bells and whistles you’d expect in a 2007 launch. For instance, the site, which will soon launch in beta provides:
- Advice, in story form, from food to travel to shopping and of course on all things parenting;
- Entertainment tips, promoting Disney and, it says, other relevant options;
- The Disney Family 1000 of the top "approved" community sites, a kind of filter for the best parenting-oriented community sites in and around the web;
- A ParentPedia, a wiki-like experiment in answering the many questions parents have, and a simplified search — Family Tool Box — to help locate items, issues and bargains;
- User-generated options, including commenting abilities on each story.
How big’s the market? Disney estimates there are 32 million U.S. mothers online.
The Family.com announcement follows the recent revamp of Disney.com. The redo added more games and videos and more age-specific navigation, and has been seen as another chance for the company to get its brand maximized on the web.
In Outsell’s Opinion: Disney’s foray into a new parenting site could be a winning one, but it will have to face the facts of web self-segmentation. There are lots of family sites. Some focus on media choices. Some follow religious principles. Some focus on early childhood. Others concentrate on raising teens. In 2007, one size does not fit all for the American family. That’s the challenge Disney will tackle in creating an umbrella "family site". It has had similar difficulties figuring out how to orient Disney.com.
In its efforts to create an umbrella site, its Disney Family 1000 is an interesting notion. Maybe Disney can be both a producer of content and a guide, a pointer, and a filter to the best "other" content. The challenge here is recognizing that there will be content that Disney won’t be comfortable having under its own brand, yet it may be "included" on the Disney-branded family site. It’s a tricky challenge, especially for a company so concerned about its brand purity.
Adaptability will be the key to Family.com’s fortunes. Certainly, there is a vast U.S. — and then global — market, if Disney can continually enlarge the focus of the site and relax its approach to its brands, acknowledging that smart readers can understand the difference between Disney-produced content, Disney-pointed-to content, and the new frontier of user-generated parenting tips and comments, sure to generate controversy from the get-go.
Finally, Disney’s attempt at family information is another warning sign for another traditional provider of family fare — the daily newspaper. Outsell’s recent "New Users Survey" showed that newspapers in print remain the second highest source for "family events news." Sixty-six percent of those surveyed said newspapers were their first or second choice for family news, topped only by word of mouth with 85%. Family news and information is one of the local franchises newspapers need to do a better job of protecting — by building around ideas similar to Family.com — if they are to hold their advantage.