NBC Will Reach Every American Woman Alive, Even If It Doesn’t Know What to Do With ‘Em

What does a giant media conglomerate do when its $600 million web purchase aimed at women doesn’t meet expectations? Spend nearly a billion bucks to snap up a TV outfit aimed at women.

That’s NBC Universal’s strategy with the just-announced deal to acquire Oprah’s Oxygen network for $925 million, paid for by selling off “non-core assets,” i.e. Spanish-language stations. Oxygen’s acquisition, of course, comes after NBC snapped up online estrogen-fest iVillage.com, a purchase that, in hindsight (and with any foresight), was an egregiously overvalued property. It’s also responsible for In The Loop With iVillage, so … enough said.

But: Is Oxygen just another pumped up dollar figure? It’s available in 74 million American homes, sure. But Al Gore’s Current TV is in 40 million, and anyone in M&A would be hard-pressed to value Mr. Planet’s property at even half Oxygen’s price.

And Oxygen gets cred for being built from the ground up by Oprah, Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner, and Caryn Mandabach — rad. But if you’re best flagship programming amounts to Girls Behaving Badly and Oprah After the Show, aren’t you basically on par with MyNetworkTV?