New Women’s Website Hits the Spot

London, United Kingdom, August 19, 2009 --(PR.com)-- Powder Room Graffiti is on course to become part of the staple online diet of the over 40s woman, early traffic indications suggest.

The website, Powder Room Graffiti, rejects the glossy tradition of celebrity gossip and beauty tips, and has already surpassed all of its projections with average visitors over 110% higher than forecast after only several weeks since exiting beta testing. This is more than twice as many as predicted, with visitors spending on average over 5 minutes per visit on the site – also twice the industry average. Combined with the fact that the typical Powder Room Graffiti reader is in her early 40’s, corroborates the fact that the website is quickly resonating with its target audience.

Powder Room Graffiti (PRGraffiti) pays its selected contributors for their quality writing, and represents a new breed of online editorial which carves out a unique path between magazine journalism and unstructured user-generated content. It is already attracting input from well-known bloggers such as Potty Mummy, US success story Jody DeVere, the CEO of AskPatty.com and Josa Young who has included PRGraffiti in her virtual book tour.

“This is the key to its success”, according to American media investor and entrepreneur, John O. Morisano, one of the driving forces behind the site. Morisano, who is PRGraffiti’s chief executive officer, said: “The figures back up what we always believed to be the case – that the views and sensibilities of more mature women are largely overlooked in the magazine world, and that women want a different kind of reading matter. We’re taking a no-holds barred approach, creating a structured platform where ordinary women can share and be rewarded for their extraordinary writing on relevant subjects and with a tone that is refreshing, honest and fun. Based on our early results, we have a very bright future.”

Diane Hayman, the site’s editor-in-chief, says that the website is “already hitting the spot for women, with its new breed of editorial that isn’t patronising, evangelical or repetitive in its mantra. We’re attracting input from well-known bloggers and professional women such as Pig in the Kitchen, and Jody DeVere, the CEO of AskPatty.com. But the mainstay of Powder Room Graffiti’s success is the broad spectrum of contributors – mums, carers, career women, to name but a few. Our community has one thing in common and that’s a desire to tell it how it is.”

With sections such as Feel It!, Live It, Love It, Get It? and Byte It, Powder Room Graffiti speaks to its readers in a variety of ways that sets it apart from existing offerings.

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For further information, please contact: Louise Evans, Powder Room Graffiti media relations, 00 44 7891 242476

Notes to Editor
A few facts that inspired the creation of the site
· Women and older people are becoming the most active users of the Web (Ofcom 2007) Peter Phillips, strategy and market developments partner at Ofcom, referring to female web users in the 25 to 49 age bracket said: "It's a big shift and has implications for the kind of content that content providers want to have on the internet."
· In the age group between 25-49, the Internet is used more by women than men. Fifty-five per cent of total Internet use in the 25-34 age range is female, while among 35-49 year olds, the figure is 51 per cent. (2007’s edition of Ofcom’s annual UK Communications Market survey)
· Over 60 per cent of women over 45 (in a 2009 survey by The Lady) said that they were far more confident now than they were in their 20s and 30s
· The UK has the most active internet population in Europe thanks to widely available broadband connections that are getting cheaper every year (Ofcom 2007)
· The most entrepreneurial and inspirational age group for females is 35 – 44 (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, London Business School, February 2006)

Articles on the site
Subjects on the site are varied. They can be boundary-pushing, irreverent, or helpful, and are all a good read. Some examples are given below.

Interview with author Josa Young, Interview with Jody DeVere, The joy of bikinis when you’re ‘thirty-twelve’ years old, Texting whilst driving, Comedy central, Ah, its PMT time again!

About John O. Morisano
John O. Morisano has spent the last 20 years helping to build and run entertainment and media companies. From his first job forward, John has always found himself at the heart of a company's operations.

A CPA and graduate of Pace University in New York City, Morisano started his career at the Vista Organization, Ltd., a publicly-traded indie film company, and aided in its sale in 1989. He then joined the accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers in its entertainment and media practice. In 1993, he moved to Paris to take over the European operations of Activision, the World’s leading video game publisher. He subsequently moved back to the States and co-founded that company's business development group.

John left Activision in 1995 and returned to NYC from LA where he served as interim CEO of UK based Dewynters NA. In 1996, he joined forces with Tim Nye at the SunshineCompanies where they focused on angel investing in start ups and offering management expertise to take companies through the early stages of their growth.

While at Sunshine and through its investments which include the Sunshine Theater, Pickerel Pie Entertainment, Sunshine Direct and SaysMe.TV, John has overseen the production of dozens of hours of television, numerous feature films, hundreds of hours of internet content and a wide variety of other types of branded intellectual property. PowderRoomGraffiti represents the meeting point of many of the skills he has developed in content, technology and management.

About Diane Hayman
Diane studied Psychology at Durham University, where she also rowed for the Great Britain U23 squad, and worked as Women's Sports editor of the student newspaper.

After University, she went to work for Andersen's Consulting (now Accenture) as a management consultant for 2 years, 6 months of which were spent in Chicago.

For the next 9 years, Diane worked in the City for BZW, Barclays Capital, and WestLB, mostly as an interest rate trader, but also in Treasury Sales, and in Marketing. During this period she travelled extensively, including a year in Paris (which is where she first met John Morisano) and a year in New York.

Having given up work to have 3 children in quick succession (now aged 11, 10 and 8), Diane wrote a blog -'Drunk Mummy'- which gave her her first insight into the quality and humour of online writing, and she made numerous contacts in the online writing industry. The whole experience inspired Diane to launch PowderRoomGraffiti.