Search »

P&G, NBC U Launch Petside.com

NBC Universal and Procter & Gamble have teamed to create a portal for pet lovers; the result looks something like Yahoo or AOL for pet owners, with quite a bit of Web 2.0 sensibility thrown in.

P&G and NBC U plan to share advertising revenue from the site, Petside.com, writes The New York Times. Too, P&G will market its Iams pet food and Febreze air freshener there, while NBC U will promote some of its programs.

Jim Stengel, global marketing officer of P&G, points out that, while there is a lot of content on the web about pets - to say nothing of ecommerce - it is all fragmented. “We thought there was a big service opportunity to put it all in one place,” he is quoted as saying.

PetSmart.com pulled the most traffic of any pet site last month, with about 2.48 million visitors, per Nielsen. PetFinder.com, owned by Discovery Communications, drew 2.1 million people, and 1.1 million people visited DogBreedInfo.com. Interestingly, neither Yahoo’s pet site nor Animal Planet generated enough traffic to be picked up by Nielsen’s web panel.

Executives involved in the site say it will draw the sort of enthusiastic people whom advertisers want to reach.

NBC now has what it is calling its pet ad network, which includes space on other sites like Worldwide Fido and DogCentral.