Michael Arrington reports on Glam receiving $18m US in series C funding. Struth. They’ve got some good traffic, admittedly, but as a whole Glam is essentially a blog ring with a couple of their own blogs bolted on…ok, more that a couple, they’ve got 29 of their own blogs/ sub sites, but 205 “affiliates”. The structure of the page is interesting as well when you take a look at their page view stats, 90m pages in November, and yet it takes you at least 2-3 steps to actually get to an article on the site, the oldest trick in the book to boost your page view numbers. 76806 articles/ posts over 29 blogs/ sub sites? WTF? Are they including “affiliates” in the total? Something really odd again, if there are sooooo many page views on the Glam.com site and it’s sub sites, why is it that they currently have an Alexa ranking of 10,298 as I write this? I double checked some of their sub pages and owned blogs to be sure, they are all being served off of glam.com, so at 90million page views to the one domain, they should be pushing Top 1000 on Alexa, not still at 5 figures.
But before I sound like I’m sticking the boot in for the sake of it, I’d like to note that I’m not. I actually happen to like Glam’s setup, it’s well designed, lots of content, and it helps share the love with its “affiliates” in both traffic and advertising deals. But $18m in C series funding? I’m sure I’ve read that they’ve already taken funding previously, so it would be a case of A, B then C. $18 million?! It’s nuts. If Glam gets $18m, surely 9rules is deserving of $20m? Naturally there are some differences, moneterisation would be a big one, but tit for tat 9rules runs a similar model, and despite not really running it’s own blogs/ subsites on the 9rules.com domain, has nearly a 50% better ranking in Alexa, and has a PR8 homepage as well (compared to PR7 with Glam). Without knowing what’s behind the hood, I’d also suggest that 9rules would have the better IP in terms of tech as well.
