Yesterday we posted about Glam Media contacting Twitter app developers concerning an upcoming ‘Twitter-powered ad network’, and requested more information from CEO Samir Arora as the e-mail we were forwarded by one of the developers was rather scarce on details.
He came through earlier this morning to confirm the accuracy of the scoop, and also provided a statement from his team in order to shed more light on the imminent initiative. As we suggested, the new solution is tied to GlamApps, the company’s application platform. → Read More
Glam Media, a distributed media network comprised of both its own properties and a publisher network of hundreds of lifestyle websites and blogs, is looking to build an advertising network powered by Twitter.
We know this because a number of third-party Twitter app developers have received an e-mail this morning from Derek Houdyshell, Network Sales and Program Director for the California company, and one of them forwarded that e-mail to us.
This is what the message reads: → Read More
Tinker, the recently launched microblogging topic tracker from Glam Media, will be rolling out several new features to upgrade its service. Tinker, which we covered in depth during its launch here, allows users to quickly browse through different real-time Twitter and Facebook searches relevant to various current events, trends and breaking news. Each event, trend or news item is associated with one or more terms, which Tinker then searches for across all Tweets and then presents the relevant ones in a single stream.
Tinker is launching a people section that allows users the ability to search and discover people on Twitter. Users can find people by name, but also by location and profession. This feature ends up being a comprehensive directory of Twitter users, listed by profession, category or interest, that helps find, follow and filter people that are micro-blogging. Tinker also lets you see the most popular and influential of the Twitterati, by categorizing the people that create events and breaking news by topics such as Information Technology, Media and Real Estate. Within each category, Tinker offers sub categories of popular Twitter users. So under politics, you can search for Twitter user who blog about conservative, liberal and Republican politics. → Read More
Distributed media network Glam Media has raised $10 million more, this time specifically for its Japanese and German operations, reports PaidContent. The fifth round of funding in as many years of existence comes from Japanese VC Mizuho Venture Capital and several local advertising / media companies, but also includes a separate investment round for its German joint-venture from partner Hubert Burda Media. The total amount of capital invested in the company so far now exceeds a whopping $100 million (not including an additional $20 million in debt). → Read More
Micro-blogging is getting micro-payments. Tinker, the micro-blogging topic tracker from Glam Media which we covered in depth last night, is now live. The service tracks specific topics on both Twitter and Facebook, and allows these “event” streams to be republished as standalone widgets on blogs and other sites across the Web. I’ve embedded an example below showing the subsequent Tweets about our original article.
With the launch, Glam Media is also creating a professional micro-blogging network for journalists and bloggers who want to sign up to cover specific events or topics via Twitter or Facebook. It will be called the Tinker Micro-Bloggers Network. This will be a vetted subset of Tinker users who are advertiser-friendly. Glam is working on a micro-payments system to share revenues with approved micro-bloggers from ads in their associated widgets and Tinker streams. → Read More
The online advertising business is in for a rough patch, especially for display advertising. The signs are everywhere. Yahoo, the biggest publisher of display ads on the Web, reported a 2 percent decline in display ad revenues in the fourth quarter, and the New York Times is seeing even steeper declines.
There is just way too much advertising inventory out there, and Websites are actually trying to show less ads per page to reduce ad clutter and keep advertising rates from cratering. The chart above from comScore’s 2008 Digital Year in Review shows that the number of display ads served in the U.S. is actually slightly down from a year ago. Even so, comScore estimates that 4.5 trillion ads were served to U.S. consumers last year. That comes to 2,000 ads per month per person.
As a consequence of the declining display ad revenues and the over-saturation of ads, there is simply no need for the 300-plus ad networks out there. And what we are seeing now is the stronger ad networks are picking up funding to shore up their positions and the weaker ones are getting bought. → Read More
Glam Media has acquired AdaptiveAds, a startup based in Mumbai, India that serves display ads targetable by the demographic characteristics brand advertisers understand (such as “Women 24-40, Fashionista, Beauty”). It calls its contextual display ads BrandWords. They will now be called Glam AdaptAds.
The purchase price was not disclosed, but AdaptiveAd was shopping around a series B round with a valuation in the $25 million to $40 million range when Glam entered the picture and snapped them up. The three-year old company raised $2 million in late 2007, and then another $1.5 million ina series A, for a total of $3.5 million. Draper Fisher Jurvetson is an investor in both AdaptiveAds and Glam Media. → Read More
Of the top 100 sites on the Web, which ones grew the fastest in 2008? In a report it is preparing to release tomorrow, The comScore 2008 Digital Year In Review (which you can sign up for here), comScore ranks the 20 fastest-growing Web properties. These are out of the largest 100 sites overall. They are shown below, as measured by growth in unique visitors. (Interestingly, in a separate list of the ten largest sites, only eBay showed a decline from 2007).
Most of the big gains among the fastest growers came because acquisitions (CBS acquiring Cnet, Everyday Health acquiring Revolution Health, JPMorgan Chase acquiring Washington Mutual) or traffic and business partnerships (Break Media, Glam Media, and Everyday Health with Drugstore.com).
If you strip out all of those, which denoted by asterisks, you get the sites that grew organically, including Infospace, Wordpress, Weatherbug, Answers.com Sites, Facebook, Hearst Digital Media, and Mozilla. Here is the full list by rank and annual growth rate (same as the first chart below) → Read More
Advertising/blog network Glam Media held a company wide meeting today where employees were told about the company’s 2009 operating plan. Q4 was surprisingly strong, the company told employees, with only the auto and finance advertising sectors down significantly.
But the company is making changes anyway, they say, mostly to control expenses. The executive team will take a “25-60% reduction in pay” with an offsetting bonus based on performance should the economy not go as far south as people expect. CEO Samir Arora will be on the high end of the cut percentage. For staff salaries are being cut 3% – 15%, with the same offsetting commission plan.
I have a couple of observations. First, companies are beginning to realize that emails to staff are the best way to spread news. They tend to leak (as this one did), so there is rarely meaty stuff there. But it’s also rare for a company to slash salaries because employees are so adverse to it. It’ll be interesting to see if Glam can keep its top people. In this economy, though, I doubt many will be leaving their jobs.
The full email is below: → Read More
Glam Media has launched its application platform, called Glam Apps Atako, to the public. The platform was originally unveiled in July, and has remained in private beta until now.
Each application allows bloggers and site owners to quickly implement new functionality into their sites, with available options for syndicating content, adding rich media, and enhancing posts with comments and polls. At launch available apps include Sphere, BuzzFeed, Meebo, PollDaddy, PicApp, JS-Kit, and Kwanzoo, along with a video delivery widget developed in-house called GlamTV. Glam has also built the platform with monetization in mind, offering an integrated monetization system with built-in support for rev-shares. Built with Google Gadgets, the Glam Platform also supports OpenSocial and OpenID, with full open source availability beginning in Q4 2008. → Read More
Glam Media, the always interesting womens network (and now men’s network) is back in the news this morning.
Glam is both a direct publisher of content and an advertising network. A big part of their business model is float management – making sure that they collect money before they pay it out to partners. If they pay too soon, they could get hit with bad debt when advertisers don’t pay. Pay later, and they keep the interest they earn on partner money.
That’s why they’re extending the payment period to already beleaguered publishing partners. In a notice today, Glam blames the economy and extends payment terms from 60 or 90 to 120 days: → Read More
Fast growing women’s network Glam Media is now a fast growing women’s and men’s network with the launch of a sister (err, brother) site Brash.com later this week. Update: Brash moved up its launch to today. The site will target 18-49 year old men and will, like Glam, bring in content from a network of third party sites. Glam will focus its efforts on ad sales and gathering content partners.
Screen shots of Brash are below. More than 25 content sites have joined the Brash.com Network at launch, including: ArtistDirect; DigitalTrends.com; eCoustics.com; InGameNowSeriousWheels.com; Squidoo and MonstersandCritics.com. Content will also be syndicated from Time.com for national news; Rolling Stone for music news and updates; TheCarConnection.com for car reviews and news, SB Nation for sports coverage and CNET for technology information.
Launch advertisers include Unilever’s Axe brand deodorant, H&M and HP. The new James Bond Movie “Quantum of Solace” is one of the top new advertisers on Brash as well. Glam says that the aggregated Comscore user numbers from the original content partners is over 10 million/month. → Read More
Image licensing platform GumGum has scored a deal to serve free legal images across Glam Media’s publishing network. Glam publishers will have access to photos from Splash News’ catalog of celebrity images, many of which run from $75-500 apiece under standard licensing deals. In lieu of these fees, GumGum will allow publishers to display their images with ad overlays free of charge (publishers will receive around 20% of the revenue from these ads – the rest will go to GumGum, Glam, and Splash).
The deal comes two months after GumGum annouced a major shift in the technology used to power its platform. In the past, the site would issue photographs as Flash objects, which made them easy to track and monetize with ads. But Flash-based images are slow and clunky compared to a normal image file, which made the system unappealing to publishers. → Read More
Glam Media loves to tout its comScore numbers, and uses them to claim it is the largest collection of women’s sites in the world. And that’s true when you count all of the affiliate sites Glam does not own or operate that it sells advertising for. That’s Glam’s entire business model: sign up sites that appeal to women, and sell ads across the entire network. In June, that network reached 76.9 million people worldwide, which was flat with May (77.4 million), but much bigger than rival iVillage’s women’s network (27.6 million). But apparently, reaching 77 million people a month is not enough. Glam is now trying to strong-arm its affiliates into placing the Glam logo on every page of their site, because that is how comScore counts traffic and visitor stats for the Glam Network. In its August newsletter to affiliates, Glam is claiming that affiliates agreed to place the Glam logo on their sites as part of contract they clicked on when they signed up. This is news to at least one affiliate, who forwarded the newsletter to us. It presents this claim almost innocuously as a “Question of the Month.” Here’s an excerpt (I’ve bolded parts for emphasis): → Read More
Women’s focused advertising network Glam Media, which raised $85 million in a combined debt and equity financing in February 2008 (they have raised a total of $115 million since 2004), was rumored to be mulling over a $1.3 billion acquisition offer just a couple of months later in May. It’s a safe bet to assume that the merger discussions were leaked directly by CEO Samir Arora or his advisors at the AllThingsD conference he was attending when the story broke. We now believe that there was indeed some sort of discussion taking place that may have valued Glam at over $1 billion. Sort of. And those discussions, say multiple sources, were with AOL founder Steve Case’s Revolution Health, a health portal that launched in January 2007. Revolution Health’s board of directors includes Jim Barksdale (former CEO Netscape), Carly Fiorina (former CEO HP) and Colin Powell (former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). The merger sounds absurd on its face – the marriage of a womens blogging network with a health portal. But both companies are essentially in the business of selling ads, and there is significant overlap in their demographics if not in their actual users. Revolution Health is in trouble, and has reportedly gone through a number of layoffs and hired Morgan Stanley to represent them in a sale. Certainly their traffic has taken a nosedive, from a high of nearly 4 million monthly visitors to just 1.6 million last month (Google Trends doesn’t show this same decline, although Compete.com does). The deal may not have made sense for Glam, but it was a heck of a story to leak to the press. CrunchBase Information Glam Media Information provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase Information Revolution Health Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Fast growing women-focused blog network Sugar Inc announced that they’ve terminated their year-old ad sales relationship with NBC. All ad sales will now be via an in-house sales team, says the company. There was speculation that NBC’s recent investment in Blogher, arguably a competitor to Sugar, was to blame. But Sugar CEO Brian Sugar (guess where the company name came from) says this was purely an economic decision. NBC’s cut of ad sales simply got too expensive. Comscore says the Sugar sites have 4.6 million unique visitors and 24 million page views per month. We’ve heard the company will do around $15 million in revenue this year, with 2/3 of that from advertising. Assuming NBC takes 50% of sales, that’s $5 million Sugar is paying them every year. Bringing sales in-house certainly makes sense. Sugar is also clearly gearing up to compete with Glam Media, a company that represents other women-focused sites for ad sales. To get there, though, Sugar needs to build up their own sales force. It looks like they’re doing exactly that. Disclosure: We partnered with Sugar for our LA party earlier this year. CrunchBase Information Sugar Inc Glam Media Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Women’s ad network Glam Media thinks it’s worth more than $1.3 billion, reports Matt Marshall at VentureBeat. That’s how much an unnamed suitor is supposedly offering for Glam. But Marshall thinks that Glam will turn it down. The company has raised $115 million, most recently in an $85 million round. Glam runs ads on female-oriented Websites that it says reaches 64 million people a month. Today it just launched a video ad service called the Glam TV Platform that bundles rights-cleared video (from partners like E! Online, CelebTV, Sony BMG, Brightcove, YouTube, and others) with video ads that publishers can put on their sites. Last March, Glam started tightening up its finances by ending its policy of giving guaranteed revenues to blogs and other publishers in its network. As we reported back then: Last year the company lost $3.7 million on $21 million in revenue. They’ve promised investors that 2008 would bring in $150 million in revenue with $40 million in profit. The only way to get there is bring in a lot more publishers, sell a lot more ads, and keep a larger share for themselves. If Glam is on target, a $1.3 Billion acquisition would be 8.7 times revenues and 32.5 times estimated profits. Is it really that beautiful? If there are any advertisers out there who can tell us their experience with ads on Glam, and the ROI theta re seeing there versus other ad networks, please share in comments. CrunchBase Information Glam Media Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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