Pet owners, there’s now a Web portal designed especially for you. Offering a full menu of cat and dog info, Petside.com is a new project launched by NBC Universal and Procter & Gamble, with the goal of attracting high Web traffic and advertising dollars.
Digital Journal — Canine etiquette at a dog park. Doggie fashion shows. Tips for living with multiple cats. A video on pet dentistry. What sounds like a pet lover’s encyclopedia is actually a new Web portal full of information on cats, dogs and the owners who love them. Petside.com is a joint website between NBC Universal and Procter & Gamble.
The website’s mission statement is clear: “Our number one priority is to give you all the reliable information you need to keep your cats and dogs happy and healthy.” To that effect, Petside.com posts tips, news, and photos cuddly pets. A news-oriented On the Petside video featured segments on quirky and intriguing segments on pet news around the world. Also, another tool helps people select the right breed of dog for their home.
Visitors are welcome to create social networking profiles in order to meet other pet owners. Petside is trying to be Yahoo, AOL and Facebook rolled into one.
Like those popular Web destination, Petside aims to attract advertisers who want to reach pet owners. Petside is open to any advertiser, even those whose products directly compete with properties owned by General Electric and Procter.
Jim Stengel, the global marketing officer of Procter & Gamble, told the New York Times:
Keeping it narrowly defined as a Procter thing would not let it acknowledge its potential. It can make a bigger splash and a bigger difference if it’s bigger and if it’s more inclusive.
This joint venture is a concerted effort to lure Internet traffic, and thus ad dollars. So far, pet sites haven’t accomplished what NBC and P&G are setting out to do. Yahoo’s pet site and Animal Planet drew such small amounts of traffic, Neilsen’s Web panel couldn’t offer any data to the public. The most popular pet site sells supplies — PetSmart.com attracts 2.48 million visitors monthly.
The Petside execs want to turn their site into the next big thing for dog and cat owners. As Stengel declared:
There’s a lot of content and e-commerce about pets, but it’s all fragmented. We thought there was a big service opportunity to put it all in one place.
