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.
I guess the investors are looking forward to another iVillage-type acquisition (which sold for $600M).
A well-deserved round of funding for a Glam, a company that understands the needs of web publishers and advertisers!
Damn, that’s a lot of mula. Sounds like they’re close to making money so they probably need to cash to cover the possible recession and to make it to profitability.
As the first poster stated, Investors only enter when there is a planned exit strategy. Must be they are shooting for a buyout or IPO
Absolutely impressive!
Great job Glam. As a member/partner of Glam I am very happy for them and trust that they will continue taking care of the smaller blogs like mine. They have always understood my needs and know that it will continue to be the case.
Is it just me, or my math is wrong..
$21M in 2007 to $150M in 2008 .. thats like 700% growth in revenue. Even Facebook doesn’t have that kind of growth let alone Glam..
I am going to play the devils advocate on this (sort of).
Why did they not get more than 85K? Were they not given when they were looking for because investors are uneasy about web 2.0 at large?
Very impressive indeed. Glam has been a great network for my site and I for one am very excited for them. My site continues to grow and Glam has been a partner every step of the way.
Chicken change!
Can any of these people sing?
really?
NICE!
Glam is Google for women. Can you display Adsense in pink?
Glam’s projections for 2007/2008 growth are completely out of whack. From an investors point of view, that should be a huge issue.
This shows Techcrunch can be wrong at times ;-). Glam is like the UADA ( that facebook app integrator, Lee Lorenzen of Altura is talking about) but for Blogs. Same story of inflated traffic numbers based on sub-properties, but a viable one to compete with bigwigs and to ensnare the VC’s who mask their technological myopia by asking for a gargantuan user base.
Glam too has no business model except contextual ads. Who cares about losing money in these times, facebook loses money faster than Glam, but atleast, Glam can demand higher ad placement rates because of a well defined audience and content theme. Tim Draper can’t contain himself talking about it anytime he is interviewed. Its what I call a real vertical aggregator. When content ( like blogs ) becomes an ample commodity, the aggregators and integrators like Glam will rule. Make way for the meta blogs….
@7 and @15, I agree it’s a bit optimistic, but Glam’s user demographics are quite different from Facebook so comparing their traffic isn’t exacty an accurate comparison.
Online ad network Adconion also raised $80M in Series C funding.
Glam is a house of cards. This is the kind of company that gives rise to the bubble executives who pump and dump. All the traffic is outside of the glam.com site and their cpms are low.
Amazing amount of capital for a sham. It’s funny how investors like to pick winners so the VCs primp up their deals to make them look like winners. Glam is just that. A venture that is masking as a winner then raise as much money as possible and hope you can go public before anyone finds out.
Thanks Mike for highlighting their weaknesses.
Glam may be a house of cards but I am following that house of cards. As a small publisher they have helped me in ways that other networks have not and that includes Blogher (a network for women). Good job Glam
@ Arrington -
Your post is a little flat. This is a HUGE amount of money for a blog network to be raising on a potentially absurd valuation given their current revenues and profits. Isn’t this big news in the Web 2.0 world, which Techcrunch ostensibly covers? How about a little more analysis, Mike???
@ClayZ
Mike’s a little busy promoting that other women’s network “PopSugar” to write a fair analysis.
Techcruch parties with PopSugar:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....-popsugar/
@ Donny
Good call. Don’t forget that TC is trying just as hard to “reach” where Glam is as an ad network.
As a proud and satisfied member of the Glam Network I am excited to hear of their latest achievement. Congrats!
This makes us happy because Glam has been nothing but supportive and beneficial for us!! I know they will now be able to do bigger and better things and we can’t wait.
If they can hit that kind of revenue growth rate with that kind of profit they definitely deserve that valuation. I think they will have to buy that revenue and that will not result in the kind of profit they are forecasting. Either that or they have some secret sauce they haven’t shared with the world…. Thinking it is more likely this is the best sale they will make all year.
Very impressive — The use of a blog/site network dedicated to women — iVillage was a great asset and will continue to be one. As for this company, the power of that number of uniques and page views is amazing. They just need to enhance the network and SEO the hell out of all their sites. I may do a synopsis of the SEO of the sites in that network — Michael, let me know
The key to targeting these audiences is through SEO and SEM - target the different genders and the sections of interest lying therein and you have yourself a highly powerful and huge network in place for ad revenue.
Glam must send out the orders to their bloggers when TechCrunch makes these posts…”run over to techcrunch and say how much you love glam”.
what a joke - so much of their traffic appears to be coming directly from these 100% CRAP sites.
romantic-lyrics.com
free-beauty-tips.com
celebrity-hairstyles.org
Seriously - head over to 2babynames.com and tell me that anyone on earth would be excited to be affiliated with crap like that.
Congratulations to Glam the highest quality women’s network. I have been a part of Glam from the beginning and my experience continues to get better. This round of funding proves to the smaller bloggers like me that we will continue to be taken care of. Keep up the great work!!!
Glam has proven once again that they get results. This is a big win for us medium size publishers who depend on Glam for all of our ad revenue. I look forward to a great 2008.
That revenue and profit projection is WAY WAY OFF! I don’t see this as realistic at all. They are a low eCPM network. Sorry, but it’ll never happen. They are trying to cash out.
Glam’s network sites are mostly crap IMHO, but they do know how to take care of their publishers.
As a European blogging network which has just re-signed to Glam, we are very pleased for them and hope they use the money to build their sales network further and get even better CPMs from advertisers! The market is tough at the moment so they have done very well to raise the money they have done.
Remember when I said there is no way Glam could get to $20MM in revenue for 2007? Guess I’ll eat my hat now…