Glam Media has scored a major senior hire, landing Josh Jacobs, Yahoo’s Vice President & GM Advertising Technology Platforms who currently runs Yahoo’s entire display ad platform and previously ran the portal’s publisher network. Jacobs will be joining Glam as Senior Vice President of Brand Advertising Products & Marketing, where he’ll run all of Glam’s brand advertising products, as well as marketing and communications. This is a major win for Glam, which has shown strong growth through the economic downturn as it eats away marketshare from the likes of Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.
In 2009, Glam’s growth rate was up 50% in display revenue, during a time when many of its competitors were seeing negative growth (Yahoo, which is the leader in display ads, is down 15% and iVillage/NBC is down 20%). → Read More
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
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
It’s not exactly the Time 100, but Glam’s new men’s network (see previous post) has its own list: the Brash 100. This is the sort of list you’d expect to see in Details, an attempt at an iconic list of “unforgettable” men. It’s filled with everyone you’d expect: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, John McCain, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Al Pacino. Even our own Michael Arrington snuck on the list (he has a tendency to do that).
If you don’t feel like clicking through all 100 names, on the Brash site you can skim through the full list below. → Read More
Editor’s Update: Glam actually acquired Codex Media back in July. What it is doing now is integrating Codex into Glam Deutschland.
Glam Media, the content network that mostly targets females, may have acquired a large German content network aimed at females, called Codex Media.
A tipster who has a connection to Codex Media first told TechCrunch about the possible acquisition this morning after receiving a letter from Codex saying “Codex Goes Glam.” On the company’s website, the same statement is used at the top of the page [Google Translation Warning].
Codex Media offers a similar service to that of Glam Media. The site offers a slew of premium female content to German women across a wide array of markets, including fashion and celebrity gossip. More importantly, many of its properties are highly sought after in the space: it owns Cosmopolitan Germany and Elle Germany, to name a few. → Read More
Glam Media has hired Michael Adair, most recently Google’s head of North American sales finance, as their new VP Corporate Development and Finance. Prior to Google Adair was an investment banker at Lehman Brothers and he has an MBA from Harvard. He’ll be responsible for making investments and acquisitions on behalf of Glam. Glam, a women-focused advertising network, raised a massive $85 million round of financing earlier this year – bringing their total capital raised to over $115 million. A lot of that money was reportedly taken off the table by Glam’s founders, but the company clearly has the cash and stock currency to make acquisitions. Presumably Adair’s deep finance and banking experience will help him make those acquisitions and investments as Glam gears up to compete with Sugar Inc. and other competitors. CrunchBase Information Michael Adair Glam Media Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Blog-focused advertising networks are all the rage right now, with both Federated Media and Glam pulling down big valuation financing rounds in the last few months based on very early growth metrics. Other startups, like Six Apart, have launched their own blog advertising networks as well. As we predicted, Technorati now joins them with the launch of Technorati Media later this morning (the site will be password protected until 9 am PST today), their own blog advertising network. This comes just a couple of days after news leaked of their new round of financing. The company has been testing the new sales product with a number of partners, including BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, GeekAlerts and NerdApproved. CEO Richard Jalichandra says these blogs reach a combined audience of approximately 17 million unique monthly visitors. Early advertisers on the network include Honda, Acura, Toyota, t-mobile, Adobe, HP, Sandisk, MSFT, Verizon, Sun, Sony, Visa, Nike, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Best Buy. Technorati has explored selling ads for third party sites for some time, but this is the first time they’ve opened the service up to anyone. Unlike Glam and Federated Media, they will take all comers, and say they expect blogs, from the large players on down through the long tail, will find they do a better job monetizing sites than the current options. Ads are sold on a CPM basis. They will not make revenue guarantees, says Jalichandra, but the split between parties is negotiable. He declined to state what rates have been negotiated with beta partners. This is similar to what Six Apart promises, which is also targeting the long tail of blogs. Jalichandra also says Technorati is uniquely positioned to sell ads at premium rates, even through small blogs, because they will be able to use descriptive tags/keywords, along with their existing blog indexing technology, to better match ads with content. Technorati’s has seven sales professionals, led by VP Sales Tony Pribyl, a new hire. They also hired a new marketing lead, Jennifer McLean, away from Glam recently. For now Technorati is only working with larger blogs, although it will be open to all comers in 2-3 months. CrunchBase Information Technorati Federated Media Glam Media Six Apart Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Personal shopping engine StyleFeeder has joined the Glam Media Network and partnered with Shopping.com for comparison pricing. The deal is a big win for Glam’s advertising network, with StyleFeeder bringing an additional 1.5 million page views (comScore) to Glam but more importantly over 1 million Facebook users (StyleFeeder claims to be the biggest shopping application on Facebook). The deal with Shopping.com sees StyleFeeder adding comparison pricing to its personalized shopping engine, providing more of a one stop shop for users. See our previous coverage here. CrunchBase Information StyleFeeder Glam Media Shopping.com Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Federated Media (FM) has rumored to have raised $50 million from Oak Hill Capital Partners on a $200 million valuation, according to VentureBeat. Total funding for Federated Media to-date would be $57.4 million. So what would Federated Media do with $50 million: Invest in sites. From a March interview: Battelle: Well, I can’t say specifically what we might do with any money that we might raise, should we do a fund-raising round. But I think there are an awful lot of opportunities in this emerging field and it’s just good to have access to capital to execute any reasonable ideas that we might have. It’s a very quickly changing market and it needs financing. I mean individual sites need financing and we want to be a good partner for all of our sites. Here’s what Michael said at the time: Here’s what I think he really means: They’ll either buy sites outright, or guarantee revenue, or guarantee revenue in exchange for equity. A publisher wouldn’t consider Federated Media an attractive investor versus venture capitalists simply because it would mean tying their revenue to them over the long term. VentureBeat talks about expanding the business and Facebook apps, but does FM really need more money to build out its core business? There’s every chance FM will be going down the Glam path in owning or part owning some sites and acting as the ad broker for others. disclosure: FM sells ads for TechCrunch CrunchBase Information Federated Media Glam Media Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Yahoo has launched Shine, a new content portal aimed at women aged 25 to 54. At its core, Shine is a large blog with magazine style layout. Content is broken up into various subcategories with the front page highlighting the newest content from across the site. Topic areas include parenting, sex and love, healthy living, food, career and money, entertainment, fashion, beauty, home life, and astrology. The Wall Street Journal quotes Amy Iorio, vice president for Yahoo Lifestyles saying internal research shows women are looking for a site to aggregate various content and communications tools: “These women were sort of caretakers for everybody in their lives,” she said. “They didn’t feel like there was a place that was looking at the whole them — as a parent, as a spouse, as a daughter. They were looking for one place that gave them everything.” With Shine, Yahoo will find itself competing with offerings from Glam Media, Sugar and iVillage. Screenshots as follows. CrunchBase Information Shine Sugar Inc Glam Media iVillage Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Advertising network Glam is putting an end to at least some of its guaranteed payments to publishers, just a month after raising an $85 million round of financing. Scott Swanson, Glam’s GM and Vice President, told publishers in an email (full text below) that “house ads” that were served for unsold inventory were being discontinued as of March 25, except to fulfill “minimum commitments that Glam has contractually agreed to.” The email says the change was made to give publishers “more choice when it comes to how you use your unsold inventory.” But according to one large publisher partner to Glam, this is actually nothing more than a way for Glam to dramatically cut payments to partners. He said “While they’re spinning this as positive news, it sucks for publishers. Publishers were previously guaranteed $3 – $5 CPMs for house ads. By no longer running any house ads, that revenue dies. And, given Glam’s fill rates retwork wide are only 30%, that’s 70% of traffic (for most publishers) that’s no longer earning revenue from Glam…It’ll basically cause a 30 – 80% drop in revenue for publishers” Glam’s business model is to guarantee minimum flat payments to publishers. A medium sized blog will receive, say, a guaranteed payment of $10,000 monthly. Glam then sells ads into those blogs, and placed house ads with a high CPM for any unsold inventory. If the blog’s page views grew, those additional payments over the guarantee could really add up. Some publishers, with 3 or more ad units on a page, could guarantee a $15 or higher RPM (revenue per thousand page views). That’s an awesome advertising income for blogs, particularly blogs targeting women generally (highly specific niche blogs can command higher rates, but usually only at scale). So why is Glam doing this? Three reasons, probably. First, they need to get costs down. 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. Second, Glam really needed to keep all those bloggers happy last year while they were raising capital. There’s no better way to do that than to send them big checks every month. Now that Glam has raised → Read More
Two thing jumped out at me when I read a CNET interview with John Battelle of Federated Media this morning – his direct criticism of competitor Glam Media as a “flavor of the month,” and his suggestion that he may take equity stakes in his publishers. Full disclosure – Federated Media is our ad selling partner. Sometimes we love them. Sometimes, not so much. Glam Media: A Flavor Of The Month The first thing that stuck out was his criticism of competitor Glam. CNET’s Stefanie Olsen asked Battelle “Vertical ad networks like Glam Media are really popular right now. Investors love them. Why do you think that is?” His response: “Because people don’t understand them and they hope things that they don’t understand will pan out.” He added “I just think they are the kind of flavor of the month, but you have to get down to where do you add value to the marketer and where do you add value to the publisher.” In a world filled with over-media-trained executives, its refreshing to see someone go after a competitor with such a direct statement. My next question would have been to ask him how Federated Media is different from Glam. Federated Media sells advertising for tech sites; Glam sells ads for women-focused sites (although their biggest partner is MyYearbook). Other than the focus of the ad sales effort, the differences are not obvious to the casual observer. The truth is the networks have significant strategic differences. Glam owns a few properties of its own, which helped in the early days as anchor properties. Federated Media does not own any major publishing sites. Glam also guarantees revenues to partners. MyYearbook is rumored to receive a guaranteed CPM on page views, and many of the blogs get guaranteed monthly payments of $10,000 or more. Those guarantees resulted in a loss for Glam of $3.7 million last year on $21 million in revenue. But it also accelerated growth and allowed them to raise a massive round of financing.Federated Media, by contrast, doesn’t guarantee revenues but is profitable. They’ve raised just $7.4 million. But Battelle also reportedly has Glam envy. He turned down a $100 million buyout offer, reportedly because he felt Federated Media should be worth at least as much as Glam ($400+ million). Will Federated Media Buy Or Invest In Publishers? The weak point of Federated Media’s model is that they → Read More
CNET is reporting that tech-focused advertising network Federated Media (which sells advertising on our behalf) is looking for a new round of financing. CNET is basing this partially on our previous report that they hired investment bank Savvian to represent them after they turned down a $100 million acquisition offer, plus a new source that says the company is looking at term sheets now. From what we hear, Federated Media is looking at both financing and new buyout offers, but wants a valuation way beyond the $100 million floated to them last year. Founder John Battelle is said to be looking for more of a Glam-like valuation, in the $400+ million range. Glam has a similar business model to Federated Media, but focuses on womens sites. Glam also guarantees significant revenue to its partners, which resulted in a loss last year of $3.7 million on $21 million in revenue. Federated Media doesn’t guarantee revenue, and is reportedly profitable (they better be, with how much of our revenue they keep). Federated Media is reportedly generating gross revenues in excess of $2 million per month, and they keep 40% of that after the split to partners. It’s unlikely the company will get buyout offers in the price range Battelle is looking for, so a new financing is likely. But part of me wonders why they’re doing this at all. A new financing means a bigger valuation, which means they need a much higher price down the road when they do eventually sell. And with competitors springing up all over the place, margins can take a hit. Perhaps Federated Media intends to take the Glam approach and go in the red for the sake of growth and begin to guarantee revenues. That’s a slippery slope, but it may also get Battelle his payday. CrunchBase Information Federated Media Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Through a variety of sources we’ve confirmed that Technorati is making plans for a major shift in its going forward strategy, and is also considering a number of corporate development transactions. First, they’ve been pitching venture capitalists on another round of financing. That’s not surprising – their last round, $10.5 million, was in June 2006. The company has raised a total of just over $20 million, and given that they have 25 employees, it’s time for another round. But we’ve also heard that they’ve hired Montgomery & Co. to shop the company to buyers, simultaneous to their funding pitches. What’s more interesting, though is what we’re hearing on the product front. Technorati, under new CEO Richard Jalichandra, recently changed it site to focus more on its core blogging audience. That change foreshadows the upcoming shift – which places the Technorati site itself as an anchor in a new blog advertising network. Advertising networks are popular right now – Glam recently raised $85 million after transitioning, seemingly overnight, from a small web property focused on women to selling advertising for a variety of similarly-focused publishers. And John Battelle’s FM Publishing, an advertising network focused on technology blogs, recently hired investment bank Savvian to help them raise money or sell after turning down a $100 million buyout offer. Technorati will certainly be competing head to head with FM, although sources say they’ll focus on the long tail of the market as well (FM only takes larger sites). The network will be a self-serve exchange for bloggers (and other publishers) as well as advertisers. Ad units will include both display and text ads, and will allow units to be charged on both a CPM and CPC basis. This self-service model looks a lot more like Adbrite than Glam or FM. Technorati tags, which are very often used to describe blog posts with keywords selected by the author, would also be a natural way for Technorati to target advertising more effectively. Technorati has also considered other strategies recently, including a blog rollup. But our understanding is that they’ve gone with the ad network idea, and are currently focusing engineers on finalizing the product. Will the strategy work? As we’ve argued many times, ad networks suffer from fickle customers. Glam offers partners revenue guarantees based on page views (and lost $3.7 million last year on $21 million in revenue). FM has resisted guarantees to date, → Read More
Brisbane, California based Glam Media reported an $85 million round of financing, their fourth, today. We first reported that Glam was looking to raise as much as $200 million in August 2007. More rumors popped up in November 2007. The round was $65 million in cash and $20 million in debt, on top of almost $30 million they raised in three prior rounds. Investors included Hubert Burda Media, GLG Partners, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, Hercules Technology Growth Capital, Accel, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Information Capital. The valuation, as expected, was in the half billion dollar range. The company, according to their original offering document, which is embedded below, is not yet profitable. They lost around $3.7 million on $21 million in revenue in 2007. 2008 projected revenues are $150 million and $40 million in profit. Glam operates a number of small sites geared towards women. Glam.com is the main anchor with the largest reach among these properties, but other owned sites appear to be pure SEO plays like free-beauty-tips.com and celebrity-hairstyles.org. They also sell advertisements for other sites, which make up the vast bulk of its page views. We have criticized them in the past for claiming to be the largest womens site on the Internet, and the fastest growing site in the U.S., based on traffic coming from sites they sell ads for. As an ad network Glam may find its margins squeezed as competition increases. Still, they control a lot of page views. Comscore reports that worldwide uniques across all sites that Glam sells advertising for had nearly 47 million unique visitors and 1.1 billion page views. That’s 4x the unique visitors and 11x the page views from a year ago. http://www.docstoc.com/docs/wrapper.ashx?doc_id=412152&swf_url=http%3A//content1.docstoc.com.s3.amazonaws.com/Glam_Media_Teaser_Aug_07.pdf.swf&showrelated=0&showotherdocs=0&showstats=0&enableFullScreen=1Glam Media Teaser August 2007 CrunchBase Information Glam Media Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Ad network Glam got a glowing review from Jeff Jarvis today. And he’s not the only person out there that likes them – word is they closed the big round of financing they’ve been trying to raise, at a $450 million valuation. I mentioned that they were raising money in an August post. In that post I heavily criticized the company for trying to claim it was the largest womens site on the Internet, as well as the fastest growing U.S. web site. In their offering document, they said “Glam Media is a Web 2.0 distributed media company that is number one in reach for women as reported by comScore Media Metrix…Glam Media is the fastest growing web property in the United States…” But Glam isn’t really the largest women’s site on the Internet – not by a long stretch. Rather, it’s a collection of a few sites that they own that generate some page views, plus a big ad sales team that sells ads for 600 or so other blogs and websites. In August the company claimed 19 million monthly visitors, but just 3.4% of them (654,000) actually visited Glam.com. The company will lose about $3.7 million this year on $21 million in revenue. The company still claims to be the largest women’s site on the net, and still talks about those big unique visitor numbers. But their real position is much different – they rely completely on their partners for page views and advertising inventory. Jarvis says Glam only had to “fire” one content partner this year. That suggests the power in the relationship sits entirely with Glam, when in fact the opposite is true. For now, many of their partners have few choices in selling ads. But competition is clearly coming (Sugar, Inc. is going in this direction, for example). And when publishers have multiple choices for ad networks, they’ll start asking for guarantees and better margins. That will cut into Glam’s already unprofitable business model. Not only will competition hurt Glam, but their network partners will leave them once they grow to a certain size. As soon as it costs less to simply hire a salesperson instead of paying Glam 40% of revenue, they’ll leave. So while I think Glam is great, i don’t see them as the redefinition of new media and I do see some real problems with their business model. Whoever creates the → Read More
Glam Media, which is mostly an ad network but also owns a group of sites focused on women, is actively attempting to raise $200 million in a private round of financing. The company previously raised $18.5 million in December 2006. The company has hired Allen & Company to represent them in the transaction, and has been distributing a private placement document to potential investors. They’ve actually distributed it a little too liberally – we have a copy and have embedded it at the bottom of this post. Glam has driven revenue aggressively and say they’ll get to $21 million this year, and $150 million next year. Losses this year are expected to be around $3.7 million. But the company is driving that revenue by selling ads for partner websites, not on their own page views. A minimal amount of research into their business shows that the company is an ad network, not a content site. In the private placement document, Glam describes itself in the first sentence as “Glam Media is a Web 2.0 distributed media company that is number one in reach for women as reported by comScore Media Metrix.” I believe this is a perversion of the term “Web 2.0″ (see below – any company this deep in SEO shenanigans is very Web 1.0 focused) and the company certainly is not the largest womens site on the Internet. While revenue growth looks good, Glam isn’t really a content site. They’re little more than an ad network that is claiming the traffic for all of its partners to make it look like a huge womens destination site. Traffic Nonsense A cornerstone of the company’s argument for raising such a large round is their tremendous growth over the last twelve months. They boast of faster growth than MySpace, and claim to be the no. 1 womens website on the Internet with 19.1 million unique monthly users: Glam Media has grown from 782,000 unique users in June 2006, to 19.1 million unique users in June 2007. By way of comparison, MySpace grew from 1.6 to 15.6 million unique users the year prior to its acquisition by News Corporation in July 2005. Glam has been ranked as the highest in traffic growth in the Top Web 100 web properties by comScore Media Metrix for the past 6 months. By May 2007, the Company had reached #1 ranking (in terms of traffic) in → Read More
Glam Media, a fashion and lifestyle Web site, has a trifecta of news today. It has received $18 million in Series C funding, CNET chairman Jarl Mohn is joining the company as an investor and strategic adviser, and there is a new partnership with Hearst Magazines to bring articles from their popular magazines, starting with Marie Claire, to Glam.com. The funding was led by Duff Ackerman & Goodrich Ventures (DAG), with participation from existing investors Accel Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, WaldenVC, and Information Capital. The money will be used to accelerate the growth of the network on the Web and expand the sales and editorial teams. The Hearst/Marie Claire deal is a major move on the part of the fashion magazine industry. Typically high-fashion magazines horde their editorial content for their print versions. Magazine Web sites are a hodgepodge of advertising and blurbs. Bringing real magazine content to the online network is a smart move that is a long time coming. Glam Media reaches over 7 million global unique visitors per month and is a top 10 women’s property, according to comScore Media Metrix October 2006 reports. So why has it taken so long? “From a business perspective, print magazines are an incredible place. Whereas all other offline mediums have been declining, print magazines have not been declining,” said Samir Arora, chairman and founder of Glam Media. “They’ve been steady at about 17 percent of advertising over the last five years and most of their focus is on print, as opposed to online.” Arora pointed out that online advertising has not been geared towards women in the same way that offline magazine traditionally is. “In 2004, under 50 percent of ecommerce was targeted towards women and in real life, that’s not the case, it’s more like 80 percent,” he said. “But when you go online, these magazines’ Web sites have largely been places to drive subscription to the print magazine. So whenever there is a medium change, it’s rare that someone that is dominating one medium also dominates the new medium.” That’s what Glam wants to do and the notion that women-targeted networks should be more than short workouts and bathing suit ads is the right way to go about it, which this woman thinks makes the company a good investment. → Read More
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