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Last year we saw MTV Networks snatch up quite a few niche social networks, in an effort to consolidate and dominate the niche network market. Most of these acquisitions were networks that still related to the teen, young-adult and post-college age, and enabled MTVN to branch of from there, into realms like LGBT lifestyle trends.
But there's more to this arm of Viacom than the quintessential youth-oriented sites that still revolve around the demographic of users that could watch music videos for 8 days straight, and in a larger effort to make sure you recognize this fact,Nickelodeon/ MTV Networks has acquired Babunga, a network of niche websites that reach out to the parenting crowd. Babunga includes BabyNamesWorld, 3DPregnancy, WikiParenting, and PetNamesWorld. Three of the sites in this network clearly go towards the parenting concerns of raising a human, but having a pet is like raising a child too, right?
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]MTVN already had ParentsConnect, which is a community that the network launched in 2006. This flagship parenting community will remain at the core of this new parenting initiative, reports MediaWeek, but has undergone some changes as well. ParentsConnect started out as a basic community, and has since grown to become more of a portal with mixed-in editorial content and more ways to encourage users to create content as well.
As a matter of fact, MTVN's acquisition of Babunga is just a part of a larger push for revamping its existing collection of networks geared towards parents. Another interesting aspect of this push is MTVN's promotion of Lifebook, which is an online scrapbooking tool for obsessive parents like Mark. ;)
But what I find most interesting about all the changes that MTVN has undergone is the inclusion of more social networking tools that very much mirror the larger, more established networks that parents often claim to shy away from (and subsequently, so do their creators). We saw a similar shift with the Eons network and CafeMom, which created a lifestyle portal for baby boomers, and eventually revamped so that it could operate more like your typical social network, all in an effort to get users to create more content.