Blog network Sugar Publishing (the most popular blog in the network is PopSugar) has raised “around $5 million” in a Series A round investment from Sequoia Capital. Michael Moritz will join the Team Sugar board of directors. No word on the valuation, although I suspect it’s in the $12-15 million range pre-money. Like all good rumors, the source of this one is a venture capitalist who tried but failed to get in on the deal. The company would not comment on this either way.
Om Malik and I compared notes and sources on this story – read his thoughts here.
The Sugar Publishing network, which includes a number of blogs and other sites catering to “young, hip women” has only been around since the Fall of 2005, but boasts a rumored 3 million unique visitors and 20+ million page views per month (up from 13 million monthly page views and 1.5 million unique visitors just a couple of months ago). See our initial review of the network from August 2006 for more.
Blog networks are hot investments right now, particularly as they continue to take traffic from established (and high-overhead) news websites. At least three blog networks have raised venture financing (GigaOm, PaidContent and B5 Media), although the size of those investments combined is probably less than this Sequoia-backed round. Weblogs, Inc. was the first blog network to have a liquidity event, selling to AOL in 2005.
Look for Sugar Publishing to launch four new blogs in the next month or so – GeekSugar (engadget’s “little sister”), GiggleSugar (“fun stuff”), BuzzSugar (music, movie, etc. review) and YumSugar (food and drink).
As I said in our first post on Sugar Publishing, you are going to start hearing about them a lot in the mainstream press