Babble.com

» see babble.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman were running Nerve.com, the late-nineties New York sex magazine that took itself seriously as writing, when people in their office started having children and Griscom had one of his own. What they found when they went looking for parenting content was a genre that assumed its reader had switched off the part of their brain that liked good sentences. Babble launched in December 2006 as the correction.

The pitch was a parenting magazine for young, educated, urban people who did not want to be talked to in a soft voice. It ran a large network of paid bloggers, and it published essays about the parts of having a small child that the category normally skipped, treating mixed feelings about parenthood as a subject rather than a confession. Inside a year it was at half a million readers a month.

By 2011 it was over four million and doubling annually, which in the mommy-blog advertising market of that moment made it a genuinely valuable property. The TED talk the two of them posted in December 2010, on four things parents never admit, is a decent recording of what the site sounded like at full volume.

~ the record ~

~ forty million dollars ~

Disney Interactive Media Group bought Babble in November 2011. The figure reported at the time was around $40 million, which bought Disney a direct line into a demographic it otherwise reached only through children: the parent making the purchase. Griscom stayed on to run it.

Under Disney the tone flattened. What had been a magazine with opinions became a content operation feeding the wider Disney family properties, and the essays that had justified the price in the first place got progressively harder to find under the recipes and the holiday lists. This is the ordinary arc for an acquired editorial site and Babble ran it faster than most.

~ one sentence from disney ~

There was no announcement. Babble.com ceased to update editorial content as of 14 December 2018, and the world found out about it on 7 January 2019, when TechCrunch noticed the site had gone still and asked. Disney's answer was one sentence about the Disney Digital Network evolving to support the launch of Disney+, which is corporate for the money is needed elsewhere.

The editors did leave something. Their last post opened "For everything there is a season, and after more than a decade of serving as a community and resource for parents, Babble will be saying goodbye." Readers were pointed at Disney Family and at Good Morning America's family section, neither of which was the thing they had been reading.

~ the zero byte redirect ~

babble.com still belongs to Disney and still answers. It 301s to family.disney.com with a zero-byte body, so twelve years of writing about the harder parts of raising a kid now resolves to a page about printable coloring sheets.

I have no personal claim on this one. Babble was a New York magazine for American parents in an American advertising market, written in a register that assumes a shared set of anxieties about how to raise a child in a particular kind of city, and I was neither its reader nor its subject. What is worth recording anyway is the shape of the death. A company paid forty million dollars for a publication, spent seven years making it less like itself, and then switched it off without telling anyone, because a streaming service needed the attention.

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