HerCampus Sees Low Harvard Readership

HerCampus, a national online women’s magazine created by four current and former Harvard students, has active readerships at Northwestern and the University of Illinois, but the site’s readership on Harvard’s campus has been comparatively lower.

Even though the site has roughly 500,000 page views per month and recently experienced a server malfunction due to high traffic, the publication is not universally recognized here at Harvard. The first seven females we asked about HerCampus all looked confused and slightly skeptical. Finally, the eighth, Tatiana Peralta ’11, said, “Maybe I’ve seen the logo.”

Further investigation led us to Kim Y. Warnick ’13 and Kellie P. Desrochers ’13, who both said they had heard of the online magazine over an e-mail list. But when asked if she would read the publication regularly, Desrochers replied in the negative.

“I don’t really know. It’s a really busy environment here. Maybe HerCampus would be another venue for procrastination.”

Last week, Harvard was not among HerCampus’ top 10 most active branches, according to Stephanie M. Kaplan ’10, one of the founders of HerCampus. She added that she isn’t sure where Harvard ranks among the site’s 60 branches in terms of readership.

“Traffic to the different branches varies a lot week to week depending on what events the branch is doing that week, that school's calendar, etc.,” wrote Kaplan in an e-mail to the Crimson, referring to the oscillation in rankings.

The two most visited branches last week were Northwestern and the University of Illinois, where sites had just been launched. The site has also been a hit at DePauw, a private liberal arts college with a 2,400 student population.

“Our overarching goal is to really make HerCampus an online hub for college women and a site that every college girl really feels like she should check everyday—after she looks at Facebook,” Kaplan said.

Photo by The Harvard Crimson.