Sassy Site Chickclick A Splashy New Net Connection For Cyber Grrls

Back in high school, you knew a couple of girls just like Heidi and Heather Swanson. Everybody did. Smart mouth. Bad attitude. Absolutely no sense of when to quit. They were the ones who could hold their own with the brainiacs and still hang out with the bad kids.

So whatever happened to those girls?

As the Swanson sisters found out, on the Web a smart mouth and a bad attitude can be considered assets rather than liabilities. Today, 25-year-old Heidi and 22-year-old Heather are the creative team behind ChickClick, an 11-month-old network of Web sites geared toward teen girls and young women.

While most of the properties in their loose confederation of “girl sites that don’t fake it” sport an edgy, home-brewed vibe, the overall network is starting to generate the kind of traffic mainstream advertisers notice. This month the Swansons estimate ChickClick member sites and the main portal, at www.chickclick.com, will log 30 million page views.

While that figure doesn’t translate into any hard number of actual readers, it’s still impressive, particularly when you consider ChickClick’s total promotional budget to date - under $25,000 - is what some other companies might spend on a single trade show.

The Swansons are native daughters of Silicon Valley. Raised in a comfortably upper-middle-class Los Gatos, Calif., household, they belong to the first generation for whom digital culture was a ubiquitous and unremarkable part of growing up. After graduating from Westmont High in 1991, Heidi bounced through three colleges in four years, finally ending up at UC-San Diego where she studied visual art, with an emphasis on film and video. In ‘95, holed up in an artist’s studio in Ketchum, Idaho, she started hanging out in some of the Web’s early communities. In short order, she’d taught herself HTML.

A year ago, after a couple of short-lived gigs as a Webmaster, Heidi pitched the concept of a Web portal for young women to Chris Anderson, president of Brisbane’s Imagine Media.

Imagine is primarily a publisher of computer magazines, with eight paper-and-ink titles (including MacAddict and PC Gamer) and seven Web ventures (including the very popular Imagine Games Network).

A project for the women’s market would be Imagine’s first foray into the world beyond the Planet Geek. Anderson said yes. Heidi called her little sister - who, at that point was barely making more than minimum wage waiting tables in Los Angeles - and told her to come on home. Heidi would be the project’s “Chief Chick” and Heather could be the “Text Diva.” Faster than you can say “two chicks in clunky platform shoes,” they were in the portal business.

On the screen, at first glance, ChickClick looks larger than it actually is. Roughly half of the main page is devoted to Heather’s punchy promos, which are designed to drive traffic to the member sites.

The other half promotes discussion boards that reside either on ChickClick and the affiliate sites. (Topics range from gun control to the politics of oral sex to “She-Ra vs. Xena: Which pop culture icon would win in the ring?”) In addition to the boards, ChickClick offers registered members free “super sassy” home pages and e-mail service. Two weeks ago ChickClick reconfigured the site into two subsites - with one track called “gURLnet” for teens and a second called “Estronet” for women ages 18-25. (Estronet’s rather cheeky tagline: “Broad-based content.”)

The 30 sites in the ChickClick network range from Lawgirl.com (copyright and trademark guides right next to articles such as “What’s the deal with Ally McBeal?”) to a women’s snowboarding ‘zine called Fresh and Tasty. While they could all be tagged “girl-friendly,” “grrrl-friendly,” “fem-centric,” or any number of similarly silly appellations, the Swansons are at a loss to enunciate exactly what constitutes the “grrrl” aesthetic. If “Net-chicks” and “Web grrrls” do share a common set of values, it’s hard to tell precisely what those might be. The single strand of common thought connecting all the sites seems to be a sense of self-empowerment. If big media sometimes speaks down to young women, grrrl media tries to encourage those same women to speak up.

Aside from the “I-am-girl, hear-me-growl” rhetoric, ChickClick as a business entity is designed to function as an advertising service bureau. Corporations such as Geffen Records, Sony Music, Netscape, Esprit and Procter & Gamble use ChickClick as an intermediary - an agent that can place banner ads across a wide range of young women’s sites. For the site owners, ChickClick affiliation means they’ll be able to concentrate on content and leave ad sales, ad server headaches and related chores to the Swansons.

In one sense, the market for women’s content on the Web is no different than that for books, sports or computer news: There’s a limit to how many players can achieve the critical mass necessary to be profitable in any niche market. As with books, sports and computer news, the women’s market is dominated by three well-funded giants. The general interest hubs - Women.com, iVillage and Electra - have tens of millions of dollars to spend on building their audience share. Although the Swansons would not disclose specific financial figures, it’s clear that they do not.

At the moment, the women of ChickClick seem becalmed, floating in an entrepreneurial twilight zone. The 11-month-old project is well beyond the trial stage, but it is a long way from being a freestanding business entity. The Swansons are still in the relative safety of the Imagine hothouse - with no hunting for venture capital, no hassles with setting up a Web infrastructure of their own and no worries that one bad month will mean the end of the party.

“I’ve loved not being on the radar this past year,” says Heidi. “It’s let us build our foundation without any distractions. Now, we have a healthy business and I’m not worried about us getting shut down. Corporate types have never really felt this type of content is financially viable. Well, there’s a readership on the Web for this. And we’ve tapped into it. Now our credibility is going to go through the roof. From now on it’s gonna be `Oh, they’re cute! They’re funky! And - oh, yeah - they’ve got big numbers.”’