I started ChickClick with my sister inside Imagine Media about seven years ago when I was 24 and she was 21, We spent the next three years directing and building the property and were fortunate enough to meet, work, and collaborate with some amazingly talented and generous people along the way.

ChickClick evolved into a large network consisting of over 2.5 million registered users, and tens of millions of page views a month. It became one of the highest trafficked girl-oriented properties on the Internet. We worked with many name brand advertisers and sponsors to support the site, and were thrilled to have girls participating on the site from every corner of the globe.

The vision for ChickClick relied on the following three premises:

1. Community. Our users voices were to be front and center whenever possible. We would highlight the ongoing dialogue being created by them about the issues they care about--activities they were participating in, their lives, individual voices and opinions. In traditional publishing the word of the editor or writer is final. Here it was to be a real-time jumping off point.

2. Sister Sites. We brought together a group of the best independently produced girl-centric content sites on the web and helped establish a revenue, and promotional stream for themselves. At the time a group of like-minded sites had a lot more strength and clout going out as a group to pitch to sponsors, instead of trying to go out and negotiate deals on their own. On the content front, it would also help ensure fresh voices, and perspectives in the notoriously homogenous women’s publishing space.

3. Tools and Services. This became our most valuable marketing and growth strategy, it also happened to be in line with our objective to get young women more interested in technology in general. You read all sorts of studies about how girls in their early teens become disinterested in technology, while boys are still learning important things about technology through use of video games (they learn operating systems, interface and navigation, etc,etc). For girls this becomes a huge handicap later on. So the idea was this: If we could get a visitor to the front door of ChickClick we would then provide different layers of involvement. Let people test the waters and whatnot, and ease into whatever they were comfortable with. You could just read the articles, sister sites, other member posts if you wanted. On the more active side, we rolled out ChickPages, and bulletin boards. Thousands of homepages were built, and millions of thoughts and opinions were logged on the bulletin boards--which in turn was inspirational to all the new users who were/are just stumbling onto ChickClick that day for the first time. The other key component here was that all the web-based services and tools out there, at the time were standard and boring, and no fun to be on at all. We would build tools and services that we actually would be enthusiastic about using.

ChickClick was eventually spun out of Imagine Media with two other web based networks into a new company which went public in March 2000.