Fast growing women-focused blog network Sugar Inc announced that they’ve terminated their year-old ad sales relationship with NBC. All ad sales will now be via an in-house sales team, says the company.
There was speculation that NBC’s recent investment in Blogher, arguably a competitor to Sugar, was to blame. But Sugar CEO Brian Sugar (guess where the company name came from) says this was purely an economic decision. NBC’s cut of ad sales simply got too expensive.
Comscore says the Sugar sites have 4.6 million unique visitors and 24 million page views per month. We’ve heard the company will do around $15 million in revenue this year, with 2/3 of that from advertising. Assuming NBC takes 50% of sales, that’s $5 million Sugar is paying them every year. Bringing sales in-house certainly makes sense.
Sugar is also clearly gearing up to compete with Glam Media, a company that represents other women-focused sites for ad sales. To get there, though, Sugar needs to build up their own sales force. It looks like they’re doing exactly that.
Disclosure: We partnered with Sugar for our LA party earlier this year.
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KaBooom!
These guys are adding Sugar sites like a mofo. Stay tuned for CupSugar, YogurtSugar, NoseHairSugar, and DustBunnySugar….
I hope this means they’ll start returning calls of PEOPLE WHO WANT TO BUY ADS.
I like Brian, but are they looking for a CEO…I might be available next month
Mike? Anyone?
Care to explain how their advertising number stack up, based on the info in the article, their RPM from advertising is around $30, surely that is too high?
15 mill / 12 months = 1.25 mill per month
2/3rds ad = $825,000 per month ad revenue
825,000/24,000 PM = $34.38 RPM from ads
Factoring in fill rates, that seems crazy am I getting my numbers wrong here?
Yes, I agree with William. Something doesn’t make sense.
Also, does it really make sense to bring the Ad Sales in house? Wasn’t NBC doing all the work for them on their behalf? What would be the cost of the team? Isn’t extra employees a rule of thumb like 6 - 8%?
I’d like to see the numbers on what Sugar Inc. brought in on Sales vs. when NBC brought in the sales for them. Just seems like a lot of extra work & extra costs when they can possibly be focusing efforts elsewhere.
We have no idea what the structure was of these two companies, however was NBC buying inventory from Sugar and then re-selling it? If that was the case then this partnership may have suffered the fate of a bad ad market… there may be too much BlogHer/ iVillage/ Bravo/ Oxygen/ * inventory on hand targeting women for them to sell?
As a young woman, I find Sugar much more appealing than the other women-oriented sites. It’s easy-to-read, in a fun style, and in general makes the younger generation (currently in their 20s and early 30s) actually want to sit and read through the site. I only go to iVillage if I’m looking for something very specific, and I usually bounce off very quickly - even this is a rare occurrence. The Sugars I actually read through, regardless of if I need to or not.
They have a viable base to look for new and better advertising, and hopefully, for the sake of reader and website, they’ll find it.
Nowadays more and more people want to date online,so do I.I joined a famous dating site for tall singles,”””” Tallchat.com “”””.There are still some models and professional athletes on it.
http://www.tallchat.com
The revenue #’s are complete horse-shit…trust me.
Hey can anyone tell me if Glam Media and Sugar link through to the same womens clothing websites???
thank you,
Sarah