Blog and media network Sugar Inc. will announce a third round of funding today, $16 million from Sequoia Capital.
They are using at least some of the proceeds, they say, to buy out NBC, which invested $10 million in the company in June 2007. The NBC investment came with an advertising sales deal that the companies dissolved last year.
The company has now raised a total of $31 million in capital.
Sugar is also announcing the acquisition of Los Angeles-based Shopflick, a video powered fashion marketplace founded by Patrick Yee in 2007. It raised $7 million last year and brought on board David Grant as CEO.
Grant, who is the former President of Fox TV Studios, will become president of a newly formed Sugar division called Sugar Digital Entertainment, which will “expand the Sugar brand into online video, television, film, videogames and other content formats.”
CEO Brian Sugar says the company is seeing nearly 100 million monthly page views per month. He won’t disclose revenue, but says that the company is now profitable. A year ago we’d heard they were doing around $15 million in annual revenue. They have 97 employees.
http://www.quan...U/traffic/sites
Is that really worth…$30 million dollars? Wow.
Out of the entire portfolio, only two sites have over a million visitors a month…thus, most people will have zero idea what brand or company is behind all that schlock.
If the company is doing well, why hide their traffic trend, when they already use quantcast?
Shopstyle has over 1 million uniques only because it is integrated into most of (if not all) of Sugar’s properties. I don’t think that their traffic numbers reflect traffic type-in traffic to the shopstyle.com domain.
Is Quantcast going to accurately reflect feeds?
Great concept of a network and a tremendous demographic for marketing. They should acquire all niche sites that would add eyeballs, such as CoutureCandy.com and others.
A little sugar for sugar…
They suddenly have magical millions after laying off nine people off six months ago?
Lame.
Congratulations Brian and crew! Looking forward to seeing Sugar grow!
‘They are using at least some of the proceeds, they say,’
Why the clear blue water, don’t you believe what Brian Sugar says?
hooray for DRUPAL!!! this entire site and network and blog publishing platform is running on drupal.org’s open source cms…