Sugar Inc.’s flagship celebrity news and photo blog,
PopSugar, has launched its 3rd annual PopSugar 100 tournament. It’s kind of like the NCAA’s March Madness, except this single-elimination contest is meant to determine who the most popular celebrities are in a given year.
PopSugar chose 128 celebrities and divided them into four groups and then ranked them from 1 to 32. The potential PopSugar 100ers are then paired up in head to head matches, at which point users can vote on who had the bigger year. Whoever wins will then proceed to the next round and so on through the rounds of Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final 4 right down to the single winner. The first round (you can vote on 64 celebrity matchups) starts today and lasts two weeks. After round one winners are determined, each round will last one week until a winner is declared in June. Readers who vote are entered to win a $3000 Chanel bag with every round they participate in. The winner of the bag also will be announced in June around when the new PopSugar 100 list is revealed.
Blog network Sugar Publishing (the most popular blog in the network is PopSugar) has raised “around $5 million” in a Series A round investment from Sequoia Capital. Michael Moritz will join the Team Sugar board of directors. No word on the valuation, although I suspect it’s in the $12-15 million range pre-money. Like all good rumors, the source of this one is a venture capitalist who tried but failed to get in on the deal. The company would not comment on this either way.
Om Malik and I compared notes and sources on this story – read his thoughts here.
The Sugar Publishing network, which includes a number of blogs and other sites catering to “young, hip women” has only been around since the Fall of 2005, but boasts a rumored 3 million unique visitors and 20+ million page views per month (up from 13 million monthly page views and 1.5 million unique visitors just a couple of months ago). See our initial review of the network from August 2006 for more.
Blog networks are hot investments right now, particularly as they continue to take traffic from established (and high-overhead) news websites. At least three blog networks have raised venture financing (GigaOm, PaidContent and B5 Media), although the size of those investments combined is probably less than this Sequoia-backed round. Weblogs, Inc. was the first blog network to have a liquidity event, selling to AOL in 2005.
Look for Sugar Publishing to launch four new blogs in the next month or so – GeekSugar (engadget’s “little sister”), GiggleSugar (”fun stuff”), BuzzSugar (music, movie, etc. review) and YumSugar (food and drink).
As I said in our first post on Sugar Publishing, you are going to start hearing about them a lot in the mainstream press
If you haven’t heard of San Francisco-based PopSugar yet, prepare yourself. You are going to start hearing about them a lot in the mainstream press. They are a blog network, and more recently a social network, targeting young, hip women (as well as a few guys that want to hang out with young, hip women).
PopSugar was founded by husband-and-wife team Lisa and Brian Sugar. Lisa began blogging PopSugar for fun last fall. By February page views were growing so rapidly that they abandoned Wordpress and set up a custom Drupal infrastructure, and in April they officially launched the network. The company is self-funded to date.
Today PopSugar is actually four distinct network sites. PopSugar itself, the largest site, is a blog about celebrity news and gossip. DearSugar is an “advice site dedicated to helping readers solve issues revolving around guys, job, money, sex, friends, and family”. FabSugar is a blog discussing “all must-have-now fashion and beauty products”. TeamSugar is what ties everything together – it’s a Myspace-type social network where readers can join, add their profile and interact with eachother. There are a lot more sites in the works – Brian told me about twelve of them that are in the planning stage when we spoke earlier this week.
The group of sites is serving over 13 million monthly page views and 1.5 million unique visitors. To get an idea of how rabid PopSugar readers are, check out this page that shows new comments being submitted in real time. This is an incredibly active community.
Networks like PopSugar, which grow rapidly from a core base of loyal readers and begin to offer related services, are very difficult to compete with. Content is produced at far lower costs and far more quickly than old-style media companies can muster (and by old-style, I’m talking about the pioneers of the early Internet days like CNET, Wired, etc.). In the old days, starting a media company was hard. There was no way to compete with the big guys. Today, it’s the big guys that are left scratching their heads.
The Popsugar team is below.
