Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is debuting its newest branded vertical—Foodie.com. As its name indicates, Glam’s newest vertical is aimed at covering all things food, and features a combination of content from food critics, bloggers, chefs, restaurateurs and other “food influentials.”
For background, Glam’s various publishing verticals have a reach of 200 million unique monthly visitors globally, and is particularly popular amongst female audiences. Glam Media has more than 2,500 publishers organized across multiple vertical categories online including Glam.com for Women, Glam Entertainment for Adults, Brash.com for Men and Bliss.com for health and wellness. Glam also announced the acquisition of Ning in September.
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Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is launching a new rich media ad creation platform for advertisers, called GlamSplash. According to Glam, the new canvas allows brand advertisers to deliver the effectiveness of the ’30-second’ TV spot across Glam’s properties.
For background, Glam’s various publishing verticals have a reach of 2o0 million unique monthly visitors globally, and is particularly popular amongst female audiences. Glam Media has more than 2,500 publishers organized across multiple vertical categories online including Glam.com for Women, Glam Entertainment for Adults, Brash.com for Men and Bliss.com for health and wellness. Glam also announced the acquisition of Ning in September. → Read More
Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is taking on Apple’s iAd today with the launch of GlamMobile, a mobile ad platform that aims to allow brand advertisers to engage with Glam’s readers of its mobile site. The company is also announcing the availability of GlamEnable, a new platform that provides publishers with the ability to develop sites for the mobile Web and create native applications for iOS and Android.
For background, Glam’s various publishing verticals have a reach of 94 million unique monthly visitors in the U.S. and more than 200 million globally, and is particularly popular amongst femaile audiences. Glam Media has more than 2,500 publishers organized across multiple vertical categories online includin Glam.com for Women, Glam Entertainment for Adults, Brash.com for Men and Bliss.com for health and wellness.
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Bubble or not, 2011 may go down as the year of the tech IPO. Not since the last bubble have we seen so many technology companies clamoring to go public. And halfway through the year, we still have many more companies who will be listing on either the NASDAQ or the NYSE in the next six months. Here’s a roundup of the tech companies that have gone public, where they are trading now, and who we can expect to see ringing the bell next.
Professional social network LinkedIn probably had the biggest IPO in terms of hype this year because it was one of the first big social media companies to go public. After pricing its IPO at $45 per share on the New York Stock Exchange, LinkedIn began trading at $83.00 per share on May 19, giving the company a $7.8 billion market cap. In the first day of trading, shares popped up to as high as $122.70, soaring past a $10 billion valuation. → Read More
Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is continuing to expand its international presence with the launch of Glam Media South Korea. The women-focused vertical will represent the sixth international country subsidiary for Glam, adding to platforms in Canada, Germany, Japan, France and the UK.
Similar to Glam’s womens entertainment, style and fashion channel Glam.com, Glam.kr will feature original stories, photos and videos, as well as curated content across a range of lifestyle categories including beauty, entertainment, fashion, health and wellness, and more. Ellie Park, formerly the editor-in-chief of Elle Magazine’s online site in South Korea, will serve as editor in chief of Glam.kr. → Read More
Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is revealing its third branded content channel today: health-focused Bliss. Bliss, which will be a content hub of health and wellness sites, joins male-focused vertical Brash and womens entertainment, style and fashion channel Glam.com. Glam’s networks currently have a total reach of 90 million people a month in the U.S and 200 million monthly visitors globally.
Glam says that traditional health and wellness sites (i.e. WebMD) have more narrowly focused on more medical and condition-related topics and are missing the opportunity to reach a wider audience with the prevention and wellness angle. Bliss’ content will include information about diet and nutrition, empowerment, alternative healing, green living, exercise, fitness, parenting, pregnancy and more. → Read More
Glam Media is one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, with a total reach of 90 million people a month in the U.S. Over the past six months, it’s launched a brand-targeted ad serving platform, Glam Adapt, and branched out from its singular focus on women’s sites to include men’s sports sites as well. Its next big push will be into social, and it starts today with the key hire of Ryan Stern as vice president of Glam Social Communities, a new business for Glam.
Stern was previously VP of publishing at FoodBuzz, a network of more than 16,000 food blogs. Her job at Glam will be to oversee a new content authoring system and convince 10,000 to 100,000 bloggers and video creators to start submitting their posts and videos into the system. In a sense, this system will be similar to AOL’s Seed, except that it will feed both Glam’s owned-and-operated sites and independent niche publishers who are part of its ad network. → Read More
The big problem in online advertising is that there is basically infinite inventory. Ads are bought on ad networks and exchanges where one site is hardly differentiated form another. Larger publishers try to battle this by putting together ad-sale packages which bundle together their higher-quality sites and then sell that as a bundle for a premium. For instance, AOL’s sales force could sell ads on TechCrunch, Engadget, and its other tech blogs all as one package. Today, putting together these kinds of package deals is pretty much a manual process.
Glam Media wants to automate that process with a new online advertising product called GlamAdapt Automate. It is the second phase of its GlamAdapt ad serving product, which it launched in 2009. GlamAdapt allows highly targeted ad serving by demographic and audience segment. The Automate product is aimed at media buyers who want to buy only certain sites, and target within those sites. So for instance, if AOL used the technology (it doesn’t, but other large publishers are testing it out), media buyers would be able to place ads only on TechCrunch and Engadget, and then target specifically 18-to-34-year-old males who are into fast cars within those sites. → Read More
Glam Media, a top-ranked women’s media network, is announcing a number of new hires today for its technology, brand sales, engineering, and product teams.
Chris Murphy joins Glam as the Sr. Director of Platform Solutions after five years working in advertising at Yahoo. Murphy originally joined Yahoo when the company acquired ad exchange RightMedia. Manuel Ponce De Leon, Glam’s new Program Manager for Media Products, joins the company after serving as the lead for the rich media product team at Google. Lindsey Frankenfield, a former ad exec at Technorati, is joining as Program Manager for Ad Serving & Data Products; and Ryan Bowermaster, Program Manager for Ad Platforms, joins Glam from Yahoo, where he worked on RightMedia’s Display Platform API. These employees will be working on Glam Adapt, the company’s recently launched new ad serving technology. → Read More
Glam Media is flexing its M&A muscle overseas. Today, it is acquiring German men’s Web property Fantastic Zero from the digital division of German media giant Holtzbrinck and European marketing agency Publigroupe.
Fantastic Zero is a collection of 50 male oriented sites with a reach of 5.5 million unique visitor a month in Germany, and 10 million overall. The acquisition price is not being disclosed, but it is a decent sized acquisition for Glam, which started in the U.S. as a collection of female-oriented sites and a larger ad network. Glam is already the the sixth largest Web property in the U.S. → Read More
Glam Media, the top-ranked women’s media network, is honing in on another target: men. This morning the company is launching BrashSports, a new content channel that encompasses a network of more than 25 sports-related properties, including SportsFanLive and Bloguin.
The launch comes on the heels of Glam’s acquisition of sports media ad network Sportgenic last week. That deal was for Sportgenic’s ad platform AdPortal, which Glam is integrating into its own GlamAdapt platform to better compete with Google’s DoubleClick. → Read More
As big brands move more of their ad budgets online, what they want most is not just to capture clicks, but to capture the attention and mindshare of consumers. The buzzword in the online advertising industry for this attention capturing quality is “engagement.” Every ad platform out there is promising to deliver more consumer engagement. Today, Glam Media, which itself is both a publisher of women’s sites and an ad network, announced an entirely new ad-serving technology platform called Glam Adapt it’s built over the past 18 months to help brands find and target the most engaged consumers.
GlamAdapt works with existing ad-serving technologies and networks such as DoubleClick, Atalas, and Eyeblaster, but Glam CEO Samir Arora has bigger ambitions for it. “It also can be used as a complete replacement for Doubleclick,” he says. GlamAdapt came out of his own frustrations as a publisher and ad network. “We were running into a wall in terms of having technology that do what the brands are asking,” says Arora: “targeted properly, engaging, detailed analytics and reporting, the aha of television. I decided to build a third generation ad-serving stack that can work with existing technologies.” → Read More
Now that Apple has rolled out its very own mobile app advertising program, iAd –hey, better name than iPad, at least –and Verizon is making a rival tablet, the advertising industry is poised for disruption. Whoever can best use geo-local data to deliver realtime relevancy will make advertisers very happy. Ads will get more interesting and interactive on elegant devices.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Big ad budgets are moving online, where brands are trying to figure out how to make display ads work for them the way search ads work for direct marketers. There is a whole array of new targeting techniques, not to mention social marketing campaigns that build buzz across YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and beyond. It’s all very confusing. So we’re assembling some of the smartest people we know in advertising to discuss these changes at Disrupt, our technology and media conference taking place May 24-26 in NYC. → Read More
Glam Media is aboutto announce that it has a new CFO, Bruce Jaffe. This signals that Glam is perhaps getting ready for an IPO, as Jaffe has a lot of experience at a big public tech company. Before he resigned a year ago, he was head of all corporate M&A at Microsoft. So he knows all the investment bankers on Wall Street pretty well.
Yahoo was rumored to be courting Jaffe also. But Glam is pre-IPO (they haven’t even filed an S1 yet), and is growing like crazy. Glam cracked Comscore’s top ten U.S. properties for the first time in March, with 80.4 million unique visitors across its network of women-oriented sites. And it still has its own $50 million war chest from its last round of funding in February. Jaffe is the perfect CFO to start spending that money on Glam’s own M&A. And an IPO would add a new currency to that war chest. → Read More
[UK/US] Fresh on the heels of $50m of new investment, Glam Media is forging ahead with its global expansion, opening a new International headquarters in London.
The vertical media and advertising network’s new office will be headed up by Co-Founder & EVP, Glam Global Partners, Ernie Cicogna, who has relocated to London to take the position of General Manager, International.
At the heart of Glam’s global plans is to become the number one in the women’s lifestyle vertical, a position it already holds in the US, UK, Germany and Japan, claims the company. Globally, Glam Media is seeing 160 million unique visitors per month. → Read More
Glam Media, the distributed media network, is rolling out its mobile publishing platform GlamMobile to the U.S. today. The GlamMobile Publisher Platform for iPad and Mobile Devices gives advertisers the ability to reach the largest audience of women online, now on mobile devices. The network, which has been available to users in Japan, allows 1,500 publishers to optimize their sites for the mobile web and offers advertisers cross-platform reach for campaigns.
For advertisers, Glam is offering engaging ad formats on a variety of devices, including formats customized for the iPad without the use of Flash. For publishers, Glam is helping provide additional waysto connect with audiences on the go. Specifically, Glam sees the iPad as an opportunity to bring magazine-like glossy content to the device (a strategy that many online sites and magazines are taking). → Read More
Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions.
Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas Google (No. 6) served up only 70 billion. (These numbers do not include paid search text ads)
Here’s the full ranking: → Read More
It’s been a long drought for IPOs, but venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs are hopeful that 2010 will be the year they rain down on the Valley once gain. Earlier this year, a handful of IPOs trickled out, such as OpenTable, Rackspace, and A123Systems. But what people are really waiting for is another Netscape moment—an iconic IPO which will whet investor’s appetites and open the floodgates for others to follow.
Below is our list of the top ten IPO candidates for 2010 in the technology industry (and, no, it doesn’t include Twitter). I conducted an informal survey of some top VCs and angel investors. These are the names whispered about the most in the Valley and other tech circles. The hope is that the economy will swing back and the public markets will become receptive to IPOs, especially towards the second half of the year. The stock market in general is finding its legs already. The S&P 500 is up 24 percent this year. If the bull market continues, that will be good for the prospects of seeing these potential IPOs. And if it doesn’t, there’s always M&A. → Read More
[France] Paris-based Glam One, not to be confused with US company Glam Media, has rolled out two new verticals. GlamZic.com and GlamSport.com will target “independent professionals” in the worlds of music and sport. This brings the total number of Glam One offerings to 7, although the company is at pains to point out that additional verticals “can be deployed in under 48 hours from start to finish”, which struck me as a little odd. Build it and they will come rarely works out on the web.
Each vertical site offers a mix of social networking, branding opportunities, productivity tools and ecommerce. Or at least as far as I can tell. The sites are exclusively in french. Oh and there’s realtime search too courtesy of a partnership with Collecta. When I checked out GlamSport, however, there didn’t seem to be much going on, although admittedly it has only just launched. It could also be a reflection of the company’s pile ‘em high strategy. → Read More
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