Republika Kobiet (Women’s Republic), a Polish lifestyle portal, has received an unspecified amount of funding from Luxembourg-based Mangrove (portfolio Skype, Piczo) and Poland’s own bmp Media Investors (via AC:Europe). The site was started by Hachette Filipacchi Polska CEO Jan DybczyDski, ex celeb mag Viva! editor Katarzyna Montgomery and former Bankier.pl financial site CEO Piotr Wsowski, and it stresses community. Republika has launched a JV site with the MaBa Czarna show of Poland’s TV4 network, hosted by Montgomery. Each investor gets a 35 percent stake.
The women’s online content market is really hotting up, as professionals use the office net with increasing sophistication and lower-cost broadband gives at-home mums a connectivity lifeline. Also today, UK mag publisher IPC has published figures after researching 7,500 women’s online habits. The lo-down: an average session of 105 minutes and nine sites, mostly morning and late evening and mostly for social networking, dating and photo sharing. Seventy-one percent of the fairer sex surveyed goes online daily, 67 percent consider themselves net-savvy and, on average, they’ve been online for six years. IPC grouped the respondents in to six, Sex In The City-style personae (see the release). The publisher launched female advice exchange GoodToKnow and domestic portal HouseToHome earlier this year.