On November 17, Hanna Rosin and Emily Bazelon, the editors of DoubleX, a seven-month-old website devoted to "What women really think," announced that their site would be folding into Slate, the 13-year-old news and commentary site from which it grew.

"The decision is being made for business reasons rather than as an editorial judgment," Rosin and Bazelon wrote. "In fact, it's the editorial quality of the site, and the way in which it so perfectly embodies the Slate DNA, that makes this a natural next step."

Reached by Portfolio.com after the announcement, Rosin reiterated that the move from stand-alone site to Slate vertical was a result of the recession, not any lack of confidence in the content she and her team created. "The plan is basically to keep a blog, in a sort of beefed-up version," she said.

"That's where we started. We'll keep a lot of the features we've been doing but keep them in Slate."

"It's a child of Slate," she continued. "It's moving back home. It may move away again."

As part of the repositioning, publisher Peggy White left the company and associate editor Samantha Henig was laid off. In a memo to staffers (posted by Gawker's John Cook), Slate Group editor in chief Jacob Weisberg said, "Bringing DoubleX back into Slate should make it easier to develop both the editorial and business sides of the project while reducing our costs significantly."

Launched as part of the Washington Post Digital's Slate Group in May, the DoubleX found some early critics, like the American Prospect's Ann Friedman, who worried about the "niche-ification of the Internet," writing, "the problem with branding certain types of articles 'for women' is that it still advances a false gender divide."

Seven months later, that criticism was echoed by Jezebel's Anna North, in a post headlined Do We Need Websites For Women? As if to answer that very point, over 200 commenters weighed in on the topic, confirming the loyal and intensely engaged audiences that flock to sites like Jezebel (part of Nick Denton's Gawker Media) and DoubleX, as well as Salon's Broadsheet blog, Yahoo's Shine, AOL's Lemondrop, Turner's the Frisky, and independent sites like Feministing. This isn't even including pioneering sites like iVillage, which launched in 1995 and sold to NBC Universal in 2006, or websites associated with established women's magazines.

There's no denying the sites' popularity. Sitemeter puts Jezebel's traffic at 1.17 million page views a day. Feministing's founder and editor Jessica Valenti recently told the New York Times Magazine that her site brings in 600,000 readers a month: Not bad for a site supported in part by readers and operated as a sideline by editors with day jobs. In 2008, the New York Times' Claire Cain Miller reported that sites aimed at women grew 35 percent the year before, "faster than every other category on the Web except politics, according to comScore, an Internet-traffic measurement company."