Sugar Inc., hot off their first acquisition (ShopStyle) two weeks ago, is announcing their second deal tonight – the purchase of fashion blog network Coutorture. Deal size is not being announced, but it was a mix of cash and stock.
Coutorture has a network of 230 blogs written by readers, who compete for headline space on the main Coutorture site. The company has raised just a single angel round, of $100k or so.
Sugar Inc., with backing from Sequoia Capital and NBC Universal, may be paving the way for future blog and content rollups in the technology space. Fashion and celebrity gossip, the two content cornerstones for Sugar, drive massive page views (the company says they are seeing 45 million monthly page views from 5 million unique visitors). And the pedigree of the company’s investors allows them to pick and choose the best competing properties to acquire. How long, I wonder, before Sugar Inc. starts getting a few acquisition offers of their own?
Sounds sweet, probablly a bunch of Mac woosies!
Everyone knows how they are all into “style”, not for real men!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
Posting #2
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
3rd
What up Steve?
This is very exciting news – especially for the beauty and fashion industries, plus the bloggers who participate. Technology isn’t the only big-time player in the online business world
That’s interesting. I wonder what they will do with Coutorture. I left the network months ago, should be interesting to see if the network can give Glam a run for it’s money….
It is great that attention is finally being paid to fashion on the internet. The internet’s importance for the future of fashion is often overlooked, and such acquisitions will at least help expose the sector further.
good to know that they’re active in acquiring the lower trafficked sites now since they are valued less. Sites such as she finds, herfablife.com are also great contenders to be acquired by any of these VC-backed companies like glam network, sugar inc etc.
Well, I am just glad that TC is starting to pay more attention to women’s sites. What happened with DamselsInSuccess was very disappointing. The women’s space is an exciting space and sites like Damsels, Sugar, etc. should be accorded proper coverage. http://www.tech...essional-women/
What is “sugar, inc.” ? I consider myself pretty with it and have never heard of these people. I checked out a few sites and don’t see anything special.
Did anyone catch this acquisition comes almost a year to the day that Julie Fredrickson appears to comment (see comment #47) of the Oct. 06 funding announcement of Sugar saying that for $5M you could have Coutorture…
See thread here:
http://www.tech...ork-team-sugar/
Funny little coincidence.
ella – i too wonder if sugar (or glam) will look to acquire the other fashion/style/shopping sites like shefinds, bussbuss, splendora, etc. who have rather large followings, but are small and most likely independently funded. or perhaps if mags (lucky, instyle, blueprint?) will go after them since they seem to be having so much trouble with the online space. should be interesting to watch…
audreya – this certainly is a space that fashion magazines need to get involved with. Few of them have really understood or captured the online space, and they could easily acquire a number of fashion orientated sites thereby extending their business, and never actually damaging or diluting their initial business model.