If you haven’t heard of San Francisco-based PopSugar yet, prepare yourself. You are going to start hearing about them a lot in the mainstream press. They are a blog network, and more recently a social network, targeting young, hip women (as well as a few guys that want to hang out with young, hip women).
PopSugar was founded by husband-and-wife team Lisa and Brian Sugar. Lisa began blogging PopSugar for fun last fall. By February page views were growing so rapidly that they abandoned Wordpress and set up a custom Drupal infrastructure, and in April they officially launched the network. The company is self-funded to date.
Today PopSugar is actually four distinct network sites. PopSugar itself, the largest site, is a blog about celebrity news and gossip. DearSugar is an “advice site dedicated to helping readers solve issues revolving around guys, job, money, sex, friends, and family”. FabSugar is a blog discussing “all must-have-now fashion and beauty products”. TeamSugar is what ties everything together - it’s a Myspace-type social network where readers can join, add their profile and interact with eachother. There are a lot more sites in the works - Brian told me about twelve of them that are in the planning stage when we spoke earlier this week.
The group of sites is serving over 13 million monthly page views and 1.5 million unique visitors. To get an idea of how rabid PopSugar readers are, check out this page that shows new comments being submitted in real time. This is an incredibly active community.
Networks like PopSugar, which grow rapidly from a core base of loyal readers and begin to offer related services, are very difficult to compete with. Content is produced at far lower costs and far more quickly than old-style media companies can muster (and by old-style, I’m talking about the pioneers of the early Internet days like CNET, Wired, etc.). In the old days, starting a media company was hard. There was no way to compete with the big guys. Today, it’s the big guys that are left scratching their heads.
The Popsugar team is below.
Comments
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I am with Babybeluga.
Kudas to the Sugars. I’ve been on Pop for over a year, and it’s amazing that what was once a small site is now a network of sites and, quite frankly, a network of darn cool people. It’s really evolved. (Anyone else remember the two other looks it had before this new design? I do!)
Even on my busiest days at work, I manage to get my Sugar fix - thanks to the new Team footers that let us sort by “most recent” posts and comments. Love it.
Team Skeptic vs. Team Sugar? Team Sugar. Nuff said.
PS Sugar Publishing peops, maybe you can make T-shirts? Ha! Can you image how Skeptic or the sign guy on here (formerly known as prince or whatever that sqiggle means) would feel if you made some money off these comments? LOL.
Kudos. I meant Kudos. Oops.
“Yes, the “team” is fully expecting a cut in the profits. You know, just like football fans get a cut when a team sells to a different owner”.
Oh, ok. Interesting metaphor to use… but I thought the ‘team’ were actively participating in the success of the website, rather than paying to watch it succeed?
Learn something new every day!…
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I am a HUGE popsugar junkie…I can not say enogh about how much Popsugar blows the ‘competetion’ (if that’s what you want to call it) away. Lisa, like many others, started blogging as a way to give her opinion with out offending anyone esle. It just so happens, millions of us share it with her. Anyone that starts a blog knows there is possible money to be made…so why not get paid to do what you love!
Popsugar is one of the few websites that you can giveyour opion with out fear that you will be ripped apart if you disagree or for what ever reason are an outcast. The comments are reviewed before they are posted, that may be the cause forthe ‘delay’ everyone is so hung up on.
I LOVE POPSUGAR!
PS, until I was hooked on Popsugar, I had no interest in Myspace. I am still loyal to the Sugars…always will be!
I happened across this thread today and am pretty astounded.
Let’s see, we have a site (PopSugar) running full steam ahead with good design, lots of live web site features, a community that is active and having a good time, expanding into areas that their *customers* want with new features, and…
many posters here can only put it down???
“Social Networking” is a new form of online community. Just like email, chat, and other technologies before it we now have another way of using the Internet. Nobody has a lock on it. It’s like saying nobody else should build cars because Ford already makes them. Good luck PopSugar (and I’ve never seen your site before today and am not a member.)
Buon luogo piacevole senza qualsiasi cosa dispari, ben progettata!
Ive been a member of pop close to a year now and I just want to say. That the sugar network let the fame or whatever it is they got from it go to there head. There totally lacking in the deparments they used to excel in and its crazy. Old regular members are totally censored and the HIGH SUGARS only seem to want more page hits so they allow it or bark at us for trying to set things right. There quest for whatever it is they wanted is going to cost them users.
I still love POP but I’m one of the older readers and, yeah, we’re resisting the constant expansion and reformatting of the website. I don’t think it’s going to hurt the Sugar sites yet… kind of like when UrbanBaby started getting so much MSM attention… but I do feel like they’re spreading themselves too thin. They had two launches (FitSugar and GiggleSugar) within a week of one another and it just feels greedy. I’m now looking for other websites that aren’t quite as big but still have good celeb gossip content, like http://www.tralalaonline.com.
I would also say that POP is in no way like MySpace. I didn’t use MySpace until I was on Pop for awhile. If anything, MySpace might be benefitting a bit from getting users on POP who are then curious about MySpace.
I am a huge fan of Sugar Publishing and I love all the new sugar sites. FitSugar.com, YumSugar.com, GiggleSugar.com, BuzzSugar.com, GeekSugar.com. I think there is nothing wrong with giving me the change to get everything I need in one shot on one network. I can’t wait until they add more sites. Makes sense to me, if I had a company that people wanted more of, I would give it to them. What is the sense in letting users get the informatio they want from somewhere else, i don’t think it is about fame (haha), it’s just good business sense.
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