Sugar Publishing, the company behind the hugely successful Team Sugar and ten or so other blogs aimed at the female demographic, will announce a new round of financing tomorrow. They are not disclosing the size of the round, but it is being led by NBC Universal, with participation from previous investor Sequioia Capital. They previously raised $5 million, on a rumored $12-15 million pre-money valuation. The deal also includes distribution through NBC’s massive ivilliage property (800 million monthly page views), and an exclusive advertising deal with NBC. Sugar Publishing continues to grow at a torrent pace. They claim 4.5 million monthly unique visitors and 40 million page views (see earlier numbers here). CEO Brian Sugar says they will continue to launch new blogs over the summer, including CasaSugar (home), LilSugar (babies), CitizenSugar (politics), PetSugar (pets) and SavvySugar (career & finance). This is a wonderful success story – we started tracking this company last August and they continue to do very, very well. → Read More
The TeamSugar Top 100 Celebrities List: In some ways it’s the equivalent of the Technorati Top 100 list for bloggers, although the participants are somewhat cooler. Read their launch announcement here. The company has aggregated hundreds of Hollywood celebrities, and pulled data on each of them from YouTube videos, Wikipedia entries, Flickr photos and Sugar Network blog posts. Users then can rate each celebrity in five categories (likability, talent, style, class and looks) on a scale from 1-10. The aggregated stats are compared to other celebrities to create the top 100 list. Each celebrity has their own page (example), and users can also leave comments about the celebrity on these pages. The top celebrity right now is Brad Pitt, with an overall rating of 7.67. Adam Brody just made the cut at no. 100, with a score of 5.27. This is yet another product from San Francisco based TeamSugar, an exploding blog network focused on celebrity gossip, fashion, fitness and other topics (the blogs are all listed at the bottom of the TeamSugar home page) . We first covered them last August, a year after launch. At the time they had 1.5 million unique visitors and 13 million monthly page views. Today, co-founder and CEO Brian Sugar says the sites generate 30 million monthly page views on 3.5 million uniques. The company raised $5 million from Sequoia in October 2006. → Read More
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