New Women’s Celebrity Blog Network Looks to Boost Profiles

Digital Media Management, a digital talent-management agency, is launching a new celebrity blog network called Women’s Influencer Network, WIN for short.

WIN is a collection of nine websites each backed by a different female celebrity including Vanessa Hudgens and Felicity Huffman.

The digital network includes Hellogiggles.com, co-founded by Zooey Deschanel, and YouMeAndCharlie.com, created by Glee’s Dianna Agron.

DMM has helped some of the sites land advertising already, but creator  Luigi Picarazzi said that combining the properties into one asset will help advertisers get the “massive reach” they desire.

It’s too soon to tell how massive this reach will be – only two out of the nine blogs have data available on ComScore, according to Advertising Age.

Hellogiggles, launched in May 2011, registered 478,000 unique visitors in April.

DMM was founded to help celebrities manage their personal brands through social media. DMM and WIN were both conceptualized by Luigi Picarazzi, previously the  longtime personal assistant of the actress Nicole Kidman.

With his five years’ experience working for Kidman and working as a web producer for Disney, Picarazzi felt there was a big opportunity for advertising and sponsorships around celebrity content as well.

The launch of WIN follow a trend of celebrity-owned media properties including Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop and Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters.

In her article “Celebs Make the Most of Social Media — on Their Own Websites,” Advertising Age’s Kunur Patel writes that celeb-owned properties don’t have the built-in mass of a Facebook or Twitter, but they can collect sharply defined niche audiences.

Unlike publishing empires run by the likes of Oprah or Martha Stewart, these newest celebrity-owned endeavors are driven by those communities, not by professionally produced content.

Most of HelloGiggles content is user-generated, said co-founder and producer Sophia Rossi.

In the balance of content versus community, developing a loyal audience and strong content is necessary  in order to get an engaged audience and show thought leadership.