Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) is expected to shutter its little-known Siren women’s portal and fold the content in to its LivingTV website. Media Week says the relaunch will take place in April.
Launched when Virgin Media rebranded 12 months ago, the Siren site includes plenty of beauty, romance and horoscope tips as well as celeb news syndicated from Press Association. Living’s telly-centric site has little such content and focuses mainly on promo’ing the shows served by the female-friendly lifestyle TV channel, like America’s Next Top Model and Boston Legal. But the channel has bigger brand awareness than Siren. VMED’s advertising head Phil Townend said virginmedia.com had 5.5 million female users per month; he wants to rival leaders like Handbag.com to become a top-five female site – that’s still a tall order, but it’s easier to do it with Living than with Siren. Living is one of the channels operated by Virgin’s content-making VMtv unit.