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.
9rules has PR8? Fuck me.
I’m just as astonished as you Duncan, in fact I left a comment at VentureBeat about it (my first one ever I think) because the total amount of capital they’ve raised is $30 million. I can see an angel investment or a few million for a media company, but $30 million?!?! In case their investors haven’t noticed, there aren’t too many $100+ million media company exits these days unless we’re talking the LA Times, Forbes magazine, or other publication houses of that caliber. A $150 million valuation needs an exit of some high multiplier on that and I just don’t see it happening no matter how big Glam gets.
Thanks a lot for the 9rules plug too, somebody over at TechCrunch brought us up in the comments as well. Maybe Glam will buy us 😉 😉
Actually they hardly share the love. They sell ads for 35CPM and then pay bloggers on clickthrough. As Nick Denton pointed out the blogs ARE Glam so it is a a damn shame they treat fine blogs so badly. Without them they are nothing.
Trust me, 9rules should stay as far away from Glam as possible. If Glam gets lucky Cathy Black at Hearst might drop 300 million on them but unless they stop lying about their traffic I have my doubts.