The World Of Mommy Blogging

The News Tribune:

If you think high school is tough, with its cliques and mean girls, you probably haven’t visited the ever-widening world of mommy blogs, where women bully and bad-mouth each other in posts that are more personal and more spiteful than you’re likely to find on sports or entertainment blogs. Or on blogs written by dads. Through the anonymity of the Internet, women accuse each other of hating their children for revealing that being a mom isn’t all milk and cookies.

And of breaking an unspoken rule of motherhood – that a mom is supposed to be her child’s biggest booster, confidant and protector, not write about his or her private life in a venue all the world can see.

All of this is occurring as mommy blogs are growing in visibility and in legitimacy.

No one knows how many mommy bloggers inhabit the blogosphere; there is no central clearinghouse for them. But BlogHer, a platform for thousands of blogs by women, says parenting is its most popular subject and accounts for more of its blogs – 5,819 – than any other topic.

Their reach is vast. Ree Drummond writes about life on an Oklahoma cattle ranch with her husband and four children on thepioneerwoman.com. Her blog – which includes anecdotes about her kids, the ranch, recipes, tips on home schooling, lists of her favorite beauty products – gets 22.4 million page views a month, according to Federated Media, which specializes in advertising for blogs.

Published last year, Drummond’s cookbook, “The Pioneer Woman Cooks” (William Morrow, $27.50), became a New York Times bestseller. And just recently, her life story – to the delight of her fans and dismay of her detractors – was optioned for a movie. As a result, advertisers are taking more notice of popular blogs and are upping the amount of money they spend on them – $283 million on all blogs in 2007 and a projection of $746 million by 2012.

And advertisers’ real darlings are mommy blogs. Because women make about 80 percent of their households’ purchasing decisions and because, according to studies, moms spend about $2 trillion annually.

Photo by Foxtongue

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