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.

As Glam CEO Samir Arora explains, there’s a large opportunity in providing quality content on recipes, restaurant reviews and tends in one place. And food has been one of the fastest growing ad verticals on Glam’s network of sites (Betty Crocker is an advertiser on Foodie.com).

Foodie features content from 100 food authors such as Inspired Taste, Kitchen Confidante and The Bakery Spot and includes more than 1,000 recipes at launch. Foodie also offers a recipe finder app that allows consumers to find and follow top food editors and chefs, and includes vertical recipe search, along with social integrations with Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, Foodie aims to be a social network for food-lovers to post recipes, photos, review other recipes and more.

As a part of the launch, Foodie is also creating a panel of culinary experts, including acclaimed food critics and celebrity chefs to help drive an authoritative perspective on recipes, restaurants, ingredients and cooking techniques. Among the culinary experts who will be a part of the Foodie community include newest Iron Chef winner, top chef Geoffrey Zakarian and the former New York Times and International Herald Tribune food critic and leading food author, Patricia Wells.

Food seems like a logical next play for Glam considering its focus on lifestyle media and content. There are a plethora of food-focused recipe verticals, such as AllRecipes, Food52, Gojee and many others. Glam hopes to differentiate itself by becoming a one-stop-shop for recipes, reviews, quality content and more. Foodie actually resembles more of an online food magazine, but with more social and interactive features.

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 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.

Glam operates a web-based ad serving platform, Glam Adapt, as well as a recently launched mobile ad platform, GlamMobile. Previously, the company served rich media ads through these ad-serving platforms, but with GlamSplash, agencies can now both build and deliver rich media ads throughout Glam properties.

GlamSplash’s ad campaigns run across many platforms, including desktop, mobile, and tablets. The canvas allows advertisers to include featured videos, moving images, and quality editorial created by brands. Advertisers can include GlamVideo, an in-stream, in-display and in-mobile video ad platform; optimize with HTML5; and integrate social sharing features within the ad unit.

A number of brands are already using GlamSplash as the holiday shopping season approaches, including Timberland and BestBuy.

It’s no secret that Glam is gearing up for an IPO in 2012 (the company has also hit $100 million in annual revenue). However, until the Ning acquisition closes, which is expected to close in the next few weeks, the IPO process is at a standstill.

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.

Glam already operates a web-based ad serving platform, Glam Adapt, but now is expanding its reach to mobile. Because of Glam’s reach amongst women in particular, the media company can deliver highly targeted, engaging advertising to this demographic. The network will also be able to target by geo-location, device type, mobile OS.

All of Glam Mobile’s ads are focused on interactive, rich media formats (more than 80 percent of all ads served through GlamAdapt are rich media ads). And Glam’s CEO Samir Arora says that the ad network is completely focused on brand-buys, and will compete directly with Apple’s iAd. The GlamMobile platform works across Apple’s iOS, Google Android, Windows Mobile, and HP Web OS.

In fact, a number of high-end brands have already signed up for Glam Mobile. Lexus and Macy’s, both of which are launch sponsors, are using Glam Mobile’s ad formats to reach women. Interestingly, we heard from sources that Glam was sniffing around a number of mobile ad networks in the early stages of developing Glam Mobile, including Greystripe, and Smaato, and decided against an outside acquisition because it was cheaper to build in-house.

GlamEnable is also launching today as a new automated platform that allows content publishers to create optimized versions of their websites for any HTML5 compatible Web browser and native applications for iOS and Android mobile operating systems. Glam Media sites (Glam.com, Bliss.com and Brash.com), as well as 75 of company’s publishing partners including Bag Snob, SheFinds, and The Young Black and Fabulous, have used GlamEnable to create optimized websites for mobile.

Glam is gearing up for an IPO in the next year, and isplanning to file its S-1 as early as this Fall. The company has also hit $100 million in annual revenue.

Apple iAd platform is reportedly suffering and is even cutting prices to entice advertisers, so it should be interesting to see how Glam Mobile performs for brands.

LINKEDIN (NYSE:LNKD)

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.

But these high stock prices didn’t sustain and LinkedIn’s value per share dropped significantly over the next month, dropping as low as $63.71 per share. However, the company’s stock rebounded last week, with shares rising as high as $95.50 on Friday, eventually closing at $94.54. That’s a 110 percent increase from its initial pricing.

PANDORA (NYSE:P)

Similar to LinkedIn, music streaming service Pandora also drew considerable attention to its IPO, which debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the desirable, single character symbol ‘P.’ The company priced its IPO at $16 per share (valuing the company at $2.6 billion), but opened at $20 per share on June 15 (up 25 percent), valuing the company at $3.2 billion.

In the two weeks following the IPO, Pandora’s stock took a bit of a dive, reaching as low as $12.16 per share. But like LinkedIn, Pandora’s shares saw an uptick over the past week, closing at $20.04 on Friday, which is up 25 percent from the company’s initial pricing in June.

YANDEX (NASDAQ:YNDX)

Russian search engine Yandex, which began trading on the NASDAQ on May 24, priced its IPO at $25 per share, but opened at $35, giving Yandex a market cap of roughly $11.2 billion. That’s a bigger market cap than both LinkedIn and Pandora.

Yandex has experienced highs and lows in the past month with the value of its stock, but the fluctuations have not been nearly as extreme as some of its contemporaries in the tech IPO market. Yandex’s stock dipped to a low of $29.73 in mid-June but rebounded quickly and closed on Friday at $35.69, which is a 40 percent increase from its initial pricing.

FUSION-IO (NYSE:FIO)

Fusion-io, the developer of flash- memory technology for companies, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on June 9. The company priced its IPO at $19 per share, valuing Fusion-io at $1.5 billion, but opened at $25 per share, giving the company a nearly $2 billion market cap.

Fusion-io’s stock has performed fairly well over the past month, reaching a high of $36.32 last week. The company’s shares closed at $31.19 on Friday, up 64 percent from its initial pricing.

HOMEAWAY (NASDAQ:AWAY)

Vacation home rental service HomeAway debuted its IPO last week, pricing at $27 per share. HomeAway, which listed on the NASDAQ, saw its shares pop over 30 percent in initial trading last Wednesday, giving the rental service as valuation of $3 billion.

HomeAway’s shares have maintained its value, relatively speaking, in its first week of trading, reaching a low of $34.92 and a high of $42.30. On Friday, HomeAway’s shares closed at $38.42, a 42 percent increase from the stock’s pricing.

RENREN (NYSE:RENN)

Chinese social network Renren actually went public before LinkedIn, pricing its IPO in early May at $14 per share, with a total offering size of $743.4 million. The company was pitching itself as a “Facebook” like site for the Chinese market, which resulted in an increase in the share price range from the initial $9-$11 to $12-$14. That increase resulted in a boost in the deal size to $743.4 million from the original price of $584 million.

RenRen opened at $18 per share, but the stock has since plummeted to as low as $6.23 per share. On Friday, RenRen closed at $9.25 per share, which is a 34 percent drop in value from the initial pricing.

BANKRATE (NYSE:RATE)

Bankrate provides free rate information to consumers on more than 300 financial products, including mortgages, credit cards, new and used automobile loans, and more. The company priced its IPO at $15 per share, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. The company’s shares, which began trading in mid-June, have remained fairly steady at this price, reaching a high of $17.89. Bankrate closed at $17.13 per share on Friday, up 13 percent.

Who’s Next Up To IPO

Zillow: Real estate listings giant Zillow filed its S-1 in April, so we could be seeing the company hit the public markets in the next two months. Zillow wants to raise $51.75 million in the offering, and while revenue has grown for the company year over year, Zillow has taked a loss for the past three years. Zillow will trade on the NASDAQ under the symbol “Z.”

Kayak: Travel search engine Kayak filed its S-1 last November, aiming to raise $50 million. No word on when the search engine is planning to IPO, but Kayak did reveal revenue growth in the past year, however net income is down. The company will trade on the NASDAQ under the symbol “KYAK.”

Groupon: Daily deals giant Groupon just filed its S-1 in June, aiming to raise $750 million in the public offering. Though the company has an impressive revenue run rate of $2.6 billion for 2011, but has drawn criticism for a lack of profits and the fact that the founders have taken a significant amount of money off the table. The company is looking at an IPO in the Fall.

Zynga: Zynga just filed for its $1 billion IPO this past Friday, revealing impressive financials. Revenues grew 392 percent in 2010, up from $121.5 million in 2009. In the first quarter of 2011 alone, the company’s revenues reached $235 million (or a $940 million revenue run-rate), which is up 134 percent from the first quarter of 2010. Both Zynga and Groupon may be rushing to IPO ahead of Facebook, which is expected to file in the coming year.

Not Yet Filed, But Champing At The Bit:

Facebook: We know an IPO is in the works for Facebook, it’s just a matter of when. The company has been meeting with bankers to discuss IPO size and time frame for an offering. And the company just added Netflix founder and CEO (and an IPO veteran) Reed Hastings to its board. It’s been thought that the social network will go public by April 2012, but it could happen before this date.

Glam Media: We’ve heard Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is planning to file for an IPO as early as this Fall. The company has hit $100 million in annual revenue, reaches 90 million people a month in the U.S., and is in the process of hiring bankers to lead its offering.

Yelp: Online reviews and daily deals giant Yelp has its sights set on an IPO, but the timeline is unclear. Yelp is now at 50 million unique visitors per month, mostly in the U.S., and has raised $56 million in funding.

Disclosure: My husband is an employee of Groupon.

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.

Glam Media South Korea is launching with 15 leading content providers such as Marie Claire, Luxury, WomanSense, iBestBaby, and more. Heesun Chin will serve as country manager for South Korea, and will lead advertising and sales operations for the platform. Glam is also incorporating its brand-targeted ad serving platform, Glam Adapt in South Korea.

Glam’s CEO Samir Arora tells us that the combination of the high number of internet users in South Korea as well as the opportunity for women’s focused content was the deciding factor in opeining up a designated South Korea site. According to comScore, South Koreans ranked number one for most page views per person and number four for number of hours spent online per person.

As we’ve heard, Glam is gearing up for an IPO in the next year. Successful properties outside the U.S. should help solidify Glam’s presence as a global content provider. The company just bought Canadian advertising media firm BBS Media this past week and will launch a Canadian site.

Arora says that Glam is seriously considering China, Russia, India, Brazil, Italy and Spain as the next possible points of entries outside of the U.S. Currently, Glam’s networks currently have a total reach of 90 million people a month in the U.S and just under 200 million monthly visitors globally. And further expansion should help the media company increase this traffic significantly.

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.

Bliss will also pursue a more social angle to health and wellness and will aim to connect and engage women in a community around these issues. While Bliss.com’s content will sway towards women, it won’t exclusively focus on women’s issues and content (as is the case with Glam.com) and will feature select male-oriented information. The Bliss Community by Glam will launched to the public later this spring and Glam’s CEO Samir Arora tells us that the company plans to roll out other verticals in 2011.

Glam’s move into health and wellness content isn’t surprising. Back in 2008, Glam was reportedly in talks to merge with AOL founder Steve Case’s health portal Revolution Health.

And the demand for health and wellness online content is on the rise. According to a Pew Internet & American Life survey from 2010, eight in every ten internet users have looked online for health information, and the number of Americans who get exercise and fitness information online has grown by 88% since 2002. Not only is there the tremendous opportunity to reach a greater audience but Glam will also appeal to a new set of advertisers in these segments.

2010 was a busy year for Glam, which 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. The company also made a number of key hires and is pushing a social strategy.

And if the IPO reports are true, Glam will have a big 2011 as well. Industry sources tell us that investment banks have been actively courting Glam for a potential public offering. And the tech IPO market is heating up, with Skype, LinkedIn, Pandora and even possibly Facebook, gearing up public offerings in the next year.

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.

The hiring of Stern signals Glam’s larger social aspirations. The investment in Glam Social, says CEO Samir Arora, “will be as as large a platform investment as Adapt. You will see hiring, building the team out, also M&A for acquisitions.” In two years, he wants to end up with “two pillars: the ad stack and the social stack.”

Arora is taking social very seriously. For the past 6 months, he’s been meeting with a few top executives to plot out “Glam 2.0.” They attempted to answer the question: “Once the whole world has a social map, what else do you do with it?” In particular, how do you map social onto niche content sites? The result will be Glam Social. Part of it will be this new crowdsourced authoring tool, but it will go beyond that. Arora wants to break up the content silos by linking social communities across related sites.

But Arora does not want to create another content farm, which are great for SEO traffic from search engines but not so good at creating the types of engagement brand advertisers are looking for. By tapping into social, Glam hopes to become the anti-content farm. He also wants to apply this strategy in a very distributed fashion across Glam’s network.

“The next generation of social is a lot of social features outside a centralized place,” he predicts. They haven’t really figured out what those features will be, but you can imagine things like a unified commenting system built on top of Facebook Connect, social recommendations across related sites within a given channel, or a check-in system which links back into the ad server (maybe the most loyal readers who check in and move up a site’s leaderboard will be worth more to advertisers).

What is significant about this new direction for Glam is that up until now its relationship with outside publishers has been purely as an ad network. But by managing and curating high-quality content on their behalf, that relationship will become more like a TV network with its affiliates where it is actually generating content for its affiliate publishers which they will be able to use to augment their own articles and videos. There may be central hubs by topic and channel where these stories and videos live, but the idea is to syndicate them broadly to publishers in the Glam advertising network.

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.

Today, most ad buying is done on an auction basis, which drives down prices for publishers and treats all ad inventory the same. It makes online advertising a commodity. Glam CEO Samir Arora wants to create a “primetime” segment of ad inventory associated with higher-quality publishers. Targeting “tech influentials,” for instance, makes more sense when they are reading about tech gadgets or tech news than when they are uploading photos to Facebook.

As he’s been testing this out, Arora also found out something else that is pretty interesting. There is a divide between search-optimized sites (code for Demand Media) and brand-friendly sites: “One thing we found was that the higher a site was optimized for SEO, the lower the time spent on it—the higher the value of the ad for SEO, and the lower the value for brand advertising.”

At least, that’s the story he’s selling. Will it resonate with publishers and media buyers?

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.

In terms of sales, Glam is bringing on Christine DeMaio as VP of Sales Development Brand Advertising from Condé Nast Digital, where she was the Vice President and Group Publisher of the entire Condé Nast Digital sales team. Another Conde Nast transplant, Dana McGovern joins Glam as the Advertising Director for the East Coast.

As the company expands internationally and continues to grow in terms of traffic, Glam is on a bit of a hiring spree. Earlier this morning, Glam announced that it was tapping former Microsoft exec Adam Roston as its new M&A head. In May, Glam poached Bruce Jaffe from Microsoft as CFO (possibly in preparation for an IPO). And Glam has been steadily bringing over talent from Yahoo; last Fall the company nabbed Yahoo’s top ad exec Josh Jacobs.

According to comScore’s latest data from August, Glam Media is now the sixth most trafficked web property in the U.S., coming in just behind AOL, and is moving into providing male-oriented content as well. Glam founder Samir Arora says that as the network continues to grow, he expects to hire more staff, increasing its existing 250-member team by 100 new employees over the next year.

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. with a reach of 98 million uniques in August, coming up fast on No. 5 AOL’s 107 million (comScore). Fantastic Zero won’t help in the U.S., but it will worldwide, where Glam has a reach of 170 million uniques.

The acquisition helps Glam not so much on the numbers, but in its attempt to broaden out to men. A year ago it launched Brash, and more recently, BrashSports.

Glam raised $50 million last February, and hired a big-gun CFO in former Microsoft executive Bruce Jaffe last May. Glam’s M&A machine is just getting rolling. Expect it to pick up more properties to expand its reach both in the U.S. and abroad as it tries to unseat AOL.

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.

Glam has historically offered properties that primarily cater to women (and has done quite well on that front), but since late 2008 it has also been targeting men with its Brash Network.  Today’s launch grows that network significantly.

Glam says that with the incorporation of the sports properties, its men’s newtork is now reaching over 30 million unique visitors a month in the United States. Glam says that this also leap-frogs them to the third most popular men’s site in the US, behind Yahoo! Sports sites (42 million uniques) and ESPN (30 million).

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.”

The current generation of ad-serving technologies, he points out, are built to “optimize clicks.”  GlamAdapt is built around a broad set of engagement metrics, including audience targeting (demographics, location, income), contextual targeting (by topic, page placement, etc.), by device or ad type (display, video, iPhone, iPad, smartphone), brand metrics (such as sentiment), content metrics (by the authority of the source), and social metrics (such as buzz on Twitter, Facebook, etc).  GlamAdapt includes a content rank, which aims to augment Pagerank as a way to determine which pages might be the best for a brand to place their ads on.  Content rank will take into account the authority of a source down to the author level, social buzz, sentiment, as well as how much that article is being linked to.

GlamAdapt is built on open APIs which other partners can build on top of to create their own brand engagement targeting capabilities. Arora gives the example of a sun screen manufacturer who was testing the system in beta and wanted to target ads to people in cities with the highest levels of ultraviolet radiation.  So it imported its own geo-data for UV levels across thecomScore,  country and used that to target ads.  Partners like Quantcast, and Pointroll can build in their own targeting capabilities tied to their existing data. For instance, a brand could target based on Quantcast or comScore demographic variables.

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.

They include Samir Arora, the CEO of the giant women’s ad-network and publisher Glam Media and Zaw Thet, CEO of SMS-advertising firm 4INFO, which counts as clients media properties like NBC, Moviefone and MySpace. Brian O’Kelley is CEO of AppNexus, which debuted its realtime advertising platform this year.  He helped shape Right Media’s technology, leading up to an $850 million acquisition by Yahoo in 2007. Eric Wheeler, CEO of 33Across, was helping Ogilvy march into a Brave New World in digital advertising before founding his online social-graph marketing firm.  From publisher to mobile marketer to technologist to ex-Mad Man, this line-up will offer insight on the best ways to continue reaching the right audience—and the technologies that will come to dominate the markets.

Disrupt’s early-bird price expires tomorrow. Get tickets here. Or, learn more about exhibiting as either an early-stage startup –special pricing — or a big man on campus here. And check out our amazing speaker lineup.

And then there’s Twitter’s roll-out of new ad programs and Facebook’s continual expansion to creating one gigantic social graph. Not to mention  the changing market dynamics  of how inventory moves on exchanges vs. networks, demand-driven networks and auctions, and the FCC’s ongoing inquiry into privacy and behavioral targeting. We want to hear what ad-tech entrepreneurs have to say. And we want to hear what you have to say, too. We’re pulling the audience onstage for some of the conference.  Will you be there?

Finally, calling all Web developers: check out our pre-event Hack Day, a gonzo overnight marathon of creativity and building products. Mashery just signed on to present an API workshop, as did SimpleGeo. Hack Day sponsor Facebook and Disrupt sponsor Yahoo will also be offering workshops. Google‘s Don Dodge will help us pick a winner on Sunday.

Image courtesy Flickr/betta design. Eric Wheeler image courtesy 33Across.

Samir Arora
Founder, Glam Media
Samir Arora helped found Glam Media as a better way for premium brand advertisers to connect with audiences online. Under his leadership, Glam Media has grown from a tiny startup with a reach of 100,000 monthly unique visitors, a network of 12 publishers and its owned and operated site Glam.com, to become the #1 online environment for women and one of the Top 10 Media Companies in the US, with over 80 Million unique visitors a month. A technology industry veteran, Arora is a serial entrepreneur who was at Apple Computer in its early years and was CEO of NetObjects, where he drove the creation of the first website-building product, NetObjects Fusion. Arora also currently serves as chairman of Information Capital LLC, a venture-capital fund that invests in leading-edge “big idea companies” in consumer publishing, media, and technology.

Brian O’Kelley
CEO, AppNexus
Brian O’Kelley is the CEO and Co-founder of AppNexus, an advanced ad platform specializing in real-time advertising. Widely considered a visionary in the field of online media, Brian created the first successful ad exchange as CTO of Right Media (acquired by Yahoo for $850MM in July 2007). Prior to Right Media, Brian was CEO of Netamorphosis, an early social networking and e-commerce site for events and venues. Brian was also an early innovator in real-time personalization and real-time ad optimization at LogicSpan, a consulting and technology integration firm, and later co-founded Cetova, a web-based reporting and analytics platform for enterprise financial systems. While earning a computer science degree at Princeton University, Brian started a web design firm, building an open-source e-commerce engine used by more than 100 companies. Brian is an active partner at Grape Arbor, an angel investor group. Since its founding in 2006, Grape Arbor LLC has made investments into more than a dozen technology companies.




Zaw Thet
CEO & Co-founder, 4INFO
As the CEO and co-founder of 4INFO, Zaw Thet is helping to set the bar for how brands reach and engage consumers with content on their mobile devices. A veteran of the software/wireless industry, Zaw has a successful track record for leading companies to outstanding growth and performance. Prior to 4INFO, Zaw was part of the early social networking industry, as a Director at Spoke Software. Zaw also did a short stint at IBM, was the co-founder and CEO of GetInventory, a web-based supply chain management company, and was a special consultant to the San Francisco 49ers. Zaw has been a featured speaker within the mobile and interactive advertising industry, recently appearing at iMedia Brand Summit, and the Mobile Media Investor Conference. Zaw has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was a Soros Fellow.


Eric Wheeler
CEO, 33Across
Eric Wheeler is CEO of 33Acroos. Prior, Eric was the CEO of Neo@Ogilvy and Executive Director of Ogilvy Interactive North America. Under his leadership, Ogilvy Interactive’s revenue grew five-fold from 2003-2007 working with leading brands including IBM, American Express, TD Ameritrade, Cisco and Yahoo!. Eric was co-founder and President/COO of Lot21, the award-winning digital agency that sold to Carat in 2002. Eric’s 18-year career includes leadership positions at CNET, Young & Rubicam and Anderson Lembke in San Francisco. Eric holds a B.A. in Political Science and Philosophy from Boston University.

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.

Jaffe already knows Glam intimately. He is an advisor to the company. At Microsoft, he was head of corporate development for MSN and then for the whole company, where he oversaw the aQuantive deal and tried to buy Yahoo.

Glam’s current CFO Steve Recht will step down after a brief transition period.

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.

Its most recent expansion was to enter France, controversial because of the trademark claims to the ‘Glam’ brand being made by local player Glam One. Glam Media says that comScore already reports 2.5m monthly unique visitors in France.

Today also sees further shuffling of the Glam Media personnel pack: Joerg Dreyer becomes CFO, Bernard Desarnauts takes the newly created position of SVP, New Market Development, and Ueso Masato becomes CTO of Glam International.

In confident mood, the company says that Glam Media International is expected to generate revenue equal to and eventually greater than revenues from North America.

Most recently, the company launched its iPad-Friendly publishing platform GlamMobile in the US.

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).

The GlamMobile Publisher Platform includes specially formatted mobile sites for content partners, mobile apps for devices like the iPad and iPhone and GlamMobile Display Ads that are optimized for mobile devices and socials adds, using Glam’s Tinker to target social conversions via Facebook and Twitter.

It’s wise for Glam to try to make its publisher network cross platform with a mobile offering. It’s sure to draw even more traffic to Glam’s sites. Today, the Glam Vertical Network has more than 500,000 articles and posts, more than 100,000 videos and upwards of 20 million micro-blog posts.
Glam Media just raised $50 million in funding and announced EBITDA profitability on North American operations and break-even results globally for Q4 2009. The company is also rumoured to be gearing up for an IPO in the next 12 – 18 months.

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:

Top Ten Publishers Of Display Ads
in billions of impressions (comScore)
1. Yahoo! Sites: 521 billion
2. Fox Interactive Media (MySPace): 368 billion
3. Facebook: 330 billion
4. Microsoft Sites: 218 billion
5. AOL: 192 billion
6. Google Sites: 7o billion
7. eBay: 36 billion
8. Glam Media: 25 billion
9. Amazon Sites: 22 billion
10. United Online: 20 billion

Obviously, the biggest sites with the most visitors serve up the most display ads. This year, Facebook doubled in size to the point where it is well past MySpace and catching up to Yahoo in audience size. It is already bigger than Yahoo in terms of pageviews.

Facebook has more advertising inventory than it knows what to do with, although not all of it is desirable. But Facebook is now selling all of its display ad inventory itself after it renegotiated its ad deal with Microsoft.

Biggest doesn’t mean most profitable. Facebook might be serving up more ads than almost anyone else, but they are still selling at very low ad rates because they perform poorly for the most part. If Facebook can figure out a way to make the ads on its site become more relevant and useful, it has a lot of room to boost its ad rates.

You can download the entire comScore report at this 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Reviewlink.

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.

1. Facebook. Total raised: $716 million.

If there is one company which everyone is looking towards for a new Netscape moment, it is Facebook.  The company can pretty much go public any time it wants.  It is already the fourth largest site in the U.S. and the world.  Its last private common stock sale valued the company at $11 billion, which may or may not be rational.  The key to a large public valuation will be whether Facebook can figure out how to turn all of that attention into advertising dollars.  So far it is said to be on track to beat its $550 million revenue projections from earlier this year.  A Facebook IPO would certainly create a halo effect for other tech offerings.  Even if it doesn’t go out in 2010, the prospect that it might could still help other companies go public as hungry investors grab what they can get.

2. Zynga. Total raised: $219 million.

Social game developer Zynga is on a tear, with more than 230 million people a month actively playing its games such as FarmVille, PetVille, and Texas HoldeEm Poker.  The company just raised a whopping $180 million round.  It is believed to be Facebook’s largest advertiser and pulling in at least $250 million in revenues on its own.  But it is also at the center of the Scamville controversy over how it makes some of its money from scammy offers.  If it can convince investors it has cleaned up its act, they will gobble up an IPO.

3. LinkedIn. Total raised: $103 million.

The other social network, LinkedIn is like the enterprise version of Facebook. It is where business gets done and people find jobs.  LAst year alone it raised about $75 million at a $1 billion valuation. Founder Reid Hoffman has spoken repeatedly about LinkedIn’s ability  to IPO.  Earlier this year, he recruited former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner to be CEO and is spending more time himself as a venture capitalist, which has always been his sideline.

4. Glam Media. Total raised: $125 million.

Glam Media is one of the fastest growing ad networks and collection of fashion- and women-oriented sites.  At a time when traditional media and women’s magazines are suffering, Glam is saw display advertising revenues across its network up more than 50 percent in 2009.  CEO Samir Arora expects the company to be profitable in the fourth quarter, and is recruiting executives with big-company experience.  Ad networks which dominate their niche are an easy lay-up for investors.

5. Demand Media. Total raised: $355 million.

Demand Media is another LA-based company, started by former MySpace chairman Richard Rosenblatt.  Demand Media owns a collection of sites such as eHow, Livestrong, and countless niche sites.  It also owns domain name registrar eNom, which generates a lot of its cash.  Demand Media is a content mill, churning out articles and videos for its niche sites like Golflink.com and Trails.com  cheaply and quickly in response to what people are searching for.  It may not be sexy, but it is lucrative enough that potential acquirers are sniffing around and AOL’s Tim Armstrong is looking to copy and improve on the niche content model.

6. Gilt Groupe. Total raised: $48 million.

Gilt is a private online shopping club for luxury goods.  Its revenues are reportedly around $200 million this year, and expected to more than double next year.  IPO talk is already in the air.  Gilt’s counterpart in Europe, Ventee-Privée, is rumored to be in acquisition talks with Amazon for around $3 billion.  And Kleiner Perkins just invested in One Kings Lane, another private shopping club based in England.

7. Etsy. Total raised: $31.6 million.

Another niche e-commerce play could be Etsy, the Brooklyn-based marketplace for handcrafted goods.  Sellers on Etsy are on track to trade $200 million worth of goods on the maretplace this year, double from last year.  Founder Rob Kalin recently took over again as CEO and says the company is now profitable.  Etsy will never be as big as eBay, but its focus means that can become a the alternative eBay for buyers and sellers of high-quality, custom-designed apparel, furniture, and other goods.

8. Yelp. Total raised: $31 million.

Yelp was nearly acquired by Google for around $500 million before the deal broke down last week.  The fast-rising local reviews site now might try the public markets instead.  The company already has 300 employees and is becoming a powerhouse in the online advertising for local businesses, which is an area of growth every major Web company wants to participate in.  Already the IPO filings are starting to come in, with ReachLocal filing to raise $100 million for its local ad network.

9. Tesla Motors Total raised: $783 million.

Why would you invest in GM IPO if you could invest in Tesla instead?  Silicon Valley’s electric car company is expected to hit the public markets.  Building a car company takes massive amounts of capital, and Tesla has raised nearly $800 million so far.  Most of that comes in the form of government loans, such as the $465 million it received as part of the government’s $25 billion bailout of the U.S. auto industry.  A lot of the capital also comes from partner Daimler, and billionaire founder Elon Musk.  But, hey, at least Tesla is profitable, which is saying a lot for a car maker.

10. Skype Total raised: $69 million

Despite all the drama surrounding eBay’s recent sale of Skype to a group of private investors including Silver Lake Partners and Andreessen Horowitz for $2.75 billion, the deal got done.  Skype is already a major Internet brand, with more than 500 million users of its Internet calling, IM, and video communications service, and $185 million in quarterly revenues.  Before eBay found its buyers, it was very publicly pursuing the IPO route.  And given that eBay retains a 30 percent stake in Skype, that is still an option if its growth continues apace.

Runner’s Up:  The ten names above are the most likely to go public if the markets open up.  Other companies which might tap the public markets include Associated Content, Brightcove, Digg, StumbleUpon, LiveOps, Workday, MerchantCircle, ExactTarget, Chegg, and Rearden Commerce.  Most informed observers do not expect a Twitter IPO next year.  It is too early.  The company just raised $100 million, and still needs to figures out its business model.  Maybe in 2011.

Which of these companies do you think is most likely to IPO?  Which ones would you invest in?

Photo credit: Flickr/David Paul Ohmer

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.

It’s rare, for example, that a company boasts about the number of domain names it owns. In this case Glam One says that it has registered over 400 two-syllable “glam” domains – number of syllables, apparently, is the new metric for domain names. And since when did buying a domain name constitute a successful business?

Which brings us to the underlying tone of Glam One’s announcement today. It and only it owns the ‘glam’ brand in France (via a number of local trademarks), a reference to US-based Glam Media’s plans to launch in said country. The press release even signs off with this friendly piece of legal speak.

“Any unauthorized commercial use of the word “glam” for goods or services in France similar to those of classes 35, 38 or 41 constitutes trademark infringement and could lead to criminal prosecution.”

In other words, Glam Media, stay off our turf.

As Twitter continues to mull over how to make money, startups are looking to capitalize on the advertising potential of the microblogging platform. Media network Glam Media is going to be launching a Twitter ad network. And today, Ad.ly, an Los Angeles-based startup, is launching a Twitter-based advertising network to connect high-end brand advertisers with celebrity and high-profile Twitter users. The idea behind the startup is simple: advertisers can pick which celeb they want to Tweet about their product and once the celeb approves the Tweet, he or she will be paid handsomely by the advertisers. Basically, Ad.ly is the middleman between advertisers and the Twitterati. In fact, founder and CEO Sean Rad says that he wants Ad.ly to be the Federated Media for Twitter.

Ad.ly’s platform is self-serve for both the Twitterati and the advertisers. So for example, an advertiser for Dell could choose which celeb or power-user to pitch their ad too and then submit a bid to a particular user. The celeb (or publisher) then approves or denies the request. Once the publisher approves the Tweet, the message is sent out via their account by Ad.ly. Each campaign requires the celeb to send out four Tweets over the course of a week. Here’s a sample Tweet that a celeb would send out. It’s important to note that each Tweet identifies Ad.ly and links to an online interactive campaign for a brand:

So how do advertisers know how well their campaign is doing on Twitter? Ad.ly features a customized dashboard that tracks click-through rates, retweets, and even the geographic location of users who retweet an ad. The startup is also in the process of launching a “machine learning client” product that would identify the makeup of a celeb’s user base and then match advertisers based on the target audience of a brand’s ad pitch. For example, the new technology will determine the breakdown of a celeb’s follower base by gender.

Each publisher sets the price of a Tweet campaign but Ad.ly will give the publisher a pricing suggestion based on variety of metrics. Ad.ly’s proprietary algorithm evaluates follower counts, authority, quality of Tweets and will help determine the Twitter’s value. And when I say that celebs get paid “handsomely,” I mean it. If a celeb has above a million followers, each Tweet gets in the five figures, with multiple Tweets about a product netting the celeb a six-figure reward (yes, for four Tweets!). Ad.ly takes a cut of what the celeb makes, but Rad wouldn’t reveal what the percentage is.

This is an interesting idea and a potentially lucrative money maker if these numbers are correct but there are a few concerns I have. First, will a celeb’s Twitter “authority” be negatively impacted by the appearance of ads within his or her stream? The second issue I have is the whole idea that a celeb will be monetizing off of other people clicking in their Tweets. I’m not sure how followers will react to this, considering many of these celebs are raking in the money as it is.

But Rad says that the ads won’t distort the quality of a celeb’s stream because the Tweets are spread out and sent every two days, and the ad campaigns that are promoted via Ad.ly’s platform are for high-end brands such as Dell, Maserati, and Hilton. He adds that ad-sponsored Tweets are clearly marked by Ad.ly so people can ignore those Tweets if they’d like. As for the monetization issue, Rad says that celebs can opt to donate any proceeds they receive from the campaign to a charity of their choice.

For the launch, Rad has accumulated an impressive list of high-profile celebs who are willing to participate in the network. Celebs include Kim Kardashian, Brooke Burke, Nicole Richie, Brody Jenner, Dr. Drew and Samantha Ronson.

Ad.ly has recently raised a Series A round of funding from GRP Partners but Rad declined to reveal the amount of funding. Ad.ly faces competition from fellow Twitter ad networks Magpie and Twittad.