(Singer Katy Perry in a publicity still for her concert film, published on Hello Giggles)
Gwenyth Paltrow’s health, fashion and wellness site Goop.com may be the most visible lifestyle site created by a celebrity, but it’s not the most popular in actual site visits and usage — by a long shot.
Goop.com focuses on detox, yoga and pregnancy tips, vegan diets and fashion by upscale designers such as Rag & Bone, often modeled by Gwyneth herself, and the site boasts a healthy email newsletter subscription list of more than 150,000. But a site that gets far less attention in the press is beating her in numbers.
Getting triple the site traffic visits and page views as Goop is the irreverent and hipster hellogiggles.com co-founded by “it” girl Zoey Deschanel, star of the TV series New Girl and half of singing team She and Him.
Deschanel launched the site in 2011 with two other business partners, including Molly McAleer, the head writer of another TV sitcom 2 Broke Girls.
According to a Google Trends analyzing data from industry experts Alexa.com, Goop pulls in about 300K visitors a month compared to more than a million for Hello Giggles.
Created as a “positive online community for women… meant to inspire a smile,” Hello Giggle’s content ranges from tips on dating a stranger to lots of cat videos, and excepts from singer Katy Perry’s concert film. Deschanel only makes occasional appearances on the site, but when she does it can have a huge impact on Hello Giggles brand awareness.
This duet by Deschanel with her “500 Days” co-star Joseph Gordon-Levitt posted by Hello Giggles on You Tube has well over 10 million views:
Runners up in the growing celeb lifestyle site trend
Breaking into the women’s lifestyle site arena is a growing trend for celebrities wishing to widen the appeal of their brand and find new markets for sales for products they might endorse or create.
The site of 27-year-old Lauren Conrad, a star of the “The Hills” offers opinions on everything from fashion to etiquette and nutrition registers an admirable 38K visitors a month (an announced site-redo later this winter hoping to push those numbers up.)
Other celebrity sites carving out a space for themselves in what’s starting to become a crowded marketplace: Tori Spelling’s site features the “ideas, icons and trends that inspire me” and of course lots of family photos. It pulls in about 20K visitors a month according to Google Trends data from Alexa. Vegan actress Alicia “Clueless” Silverstone’s site The Kind Life has an estimated traffic of about 10K per month.
Failure to launch
Gaining and sustaining a wide audience for any lifestyle site isn’t easy. According to the New York Daily News, AOL is waiting for payoff for the million dollars they gave Heidi Klum to for her lifestyle site heidiklum.aol.com.
Launched in 2010, she describes it as “a little bit of everything that I love, including fashion and beauty, fitness and nutrition, lifestyle, entertaining, recipes, parenting and more.”
(photo posted on Heidi Klum’s Instagram feed)
The site has failed to make a high-level impact and AOL execs are reportedly annoyed that Heidi is saving her best stuff for her own social media feeds — when they could be getting hundreds of thousands of hits on her AOL site . Including personal Instagram shots like the one above captioned “ouch.”
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