Glam Raises $85 million In Equity + Debt Financing Round

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=1
Glam Media Teaser August 2007