Babylist, a marketplace and commerce site for all things babies, is expanding into a new customer set with the acquisition of Expectful, a paid app providing mental health resources for parents.
Content is front and center for both companies: Expectful will launch a new website featuring content on prenatal mental health, postpartum depression and pumping at work. Per TechCrunch, it plans to eventually make its content free to access, versus subscriber-funded, part of Babylist’s larger goal to become the destination for not just baby products, but everything to do with health and wellness.
Babylist already has a thriving media footprint which combines expert-written content about parenting and babies with its product and commerce arms, which offer registry services, among other offerings. It said last week it now reached 7.5 million unique visitors a month. Last month, it launched Babylist Health and acquired a maternal health medical equipment supplier to support that launch. Acquiring Expectful will enable the company to talk to a new audience.
“More and more commerce companies are investing in content as an organic way to grow and engage with their customer base. Customers have come to expect that content will be seamlessly integrated into their shopping experience,” Natalie Gordon, CEO at Babylist, said in a statement. “We’ve been investing in this strategy for years, and it’s been a core part of our profitable growth. The Expectful acquisition is a way for us to double down on this strategy.”
The parenting media space is a particularly competitive one right now, with traditional media companies like the New York Times and Vox both creating editorial products for would-be and current parents and new media brands like Startup Parent launching to cater to entrepreneurs who happen to be parents.
How Resy won
A decade since reservations platform Resy launched, it has turned into a game-changer and mainstay for the New York restaurant experience. Last week, Eater explored how a plethora of factors enabled Resy to win at the restaurant operation system game – a pandemic-induced change in how New Yorkers viewed reservations, Resy’s own technology and more.
Content is a big part of the Resy experience. The site seamlessly integrates the ability to reserve tables with information on where you should be reserving, thanks to an editorial team that covers openings, events and interviews chefs. A couple of months ago, I caught up with Paolo Lucchesi, who AmEx-owned Resy hired from the SF Chronicle to head its push into food media. He said that content has been front of center for the company for years – it’s what heads its homepage, and Lucchesi said that publishing is credited with increasing reservations on the platform 4,000%.
Q1 temperature check
Brand publishers entered the year with a sense of trepidation. But with the year now well underway, the overall consensus among brand publishing and content executives is that expected budget contractions haven’t been as painful as expected, and they’ve introduced some much-needed lucidity within companies about the role content plays in the context of their broader strategies.
“Our budget contractions happened last year, and they were more anticipatory because we were anticipating a pullback in VC funding,” said one brand publishing executive. “Now that things haven’t been as doom and gloom as we felt like they would be, we’re back, at least in content. It’s not all milk and honey, but we’re hiring and growing.”
Also worth noting:
- NYC Mayor Eric Adams launched his newsletter.
- Crypto media got another publishing entrant with the launch of DLNews, part of LlamaCorp.