The woman behind the successful New Zealand website NZgirl, Jenene Freer, says she is moving to Australia to launch a vertical content network aimed at covering Asia and the Pacific.
It will connect women with the content they are looking for, grouping niche sites covering things such as fashion, beauty, design, food, sports and relationships.
Her new website -- called flossie.com -- will be launched with the backing of a venture capital investor, Movac, which was one of the early investors in TradeMe, and local merchant banker Lloyd Morrison.
The "angel investors" and Freer have put a total of $1.25 million into the venture.
The new website will go live on September 4, and Ms Freer said she intends within a year to turn it into the single biggest media channel for reaching women in New Zealand.
"It's a female-centric network of masthead sites," said Ms Freer, who is chief executive officer of Flossie Media Group. She has plans for rolling it out into Australia from the beginning of next year and says she will probably base herself in Sydney. Later she will roll the business out in Asia from a Singapore base.
Initially it will draw on 17 "masthead sites" including NZgirl, to provide content and attract a community of users aged 18 -55 years. It will launch in Australia with 30 sites, and Ms Freer told NZPA there was scope to for the portal to link to 200 sites.
She said there were similar sites offshore, such as Glam.com, run by the fastest growing "top 20" media company in the US and reaching 42 million visitors a month.
This type of vertical content network could provide benefits to both publishers of existing websites, and advertising agencies that wanted to overcome the fragmentation of the existing newspapers and magazines. The Glam.com business links to more than 500 lifestyle websites, blogs and magazines.
Ms Freer said she had been "inundated" with interest from New Zealand advertising agencies, who had so far mostly spent their internet budgets on the top five NZ sites, including the newspapers sites run by Fairfax and the NZ Herald, and Fairfax's TradeMe site.
Flossie would cluster the sites of smaller publishers which at the moment struggled to attract attention, and offer women-oriented content covering parenting, sex and dating, career and money, fashion, entertainment, beauty, and living/automotive/travel/food.
In addition to NZgirl, sites will include Findsomeone, Wonderwalkers, The A List, The Wire and Flossie's own editorial staff will also add content.
