Glam Media Archive

Women’s vertical network Glam Media has announced a new round of funding to the tune of $10 million dollars. This new round comes from Japan and Germany. In Japan, the funding comes from Mizuho Venture Capital and in Germany the funding comes from Hubert Burda Media. Glam has raised over $124 million in funding to-date.

Additionally Glam entered into a new joint venture with regards to their Japanese organization, Glam Media Japan KK. The joint venture brings in investments from ad agencies Dentsu and ADK and magazine publishers Shogagukan and Syueisya. There was also a local investment by Mizuho which already is an investor in Glam Media.

Glam reports via comScore that they are the leader in reach in Germany for local women with over 3 million unique visitors a month.

David Kaplan at PaidContent has more on today’s Glam transactions. David notes that while two top execs left Glam last year, they expect to hire an additional 40 staff members this year.

We first reported on the Glam Applications Network back in July. Today Glam Media is announcing several widgets that have been approved for use on the network. They include: Sphere, BuzzFeed, Meebo, PollDaddy, PicApp, JS-Kit and Kwanzoo. The apps within the network are hand-selected to "work best" for bloggers.

Glam says their new network will require IAB standard sizes and they will introduce a standardized payment system for publishers and developers. For the sites and widgets selected to be part of the Glam Apps program, it looks like a great way to gain additional distribution with little effort. Even if the take rate is low, it’s still more than not participating at all.

The widgets and applications are accessible for Glam publishers today and will be available for other publishers in early 2009. Glam notes a total reach of 52 million unique monthly visitors in the U.S. and 88 million uniques globally.

In my initial post back in July, I wondered if developers would want to create apps specifically for Glam when they could be creating apps for Facebook, MySpace, the iPhone, etc. If the Glam program can easily import apps from current providers, then the decision becomes much easier.

Women’s vertical network Glam Media is announcing the launch of a new channel in the network, Glam Wellness. The initial launch partners include: BeThree.com, Conscious Living TV, EcoFabulous, EatingWell, Lifescript, Low Impact Living and Spaparazzi.

Glam claims this new wellness channel will launch with 3 million monthly uniques and the total Glam network has over 640 content publishers and comScore reports 77 million global monthly uniques.

While this might not sound like big news, when you combine it with the launch last week of Glam’s developer platform Atako, the more blogs and content sites in the Glam network, the more distribution the developers will have access to. It will be interesting to see if Glam can "woo" developers to move off the sexy iPhone platform development and on theirs. The truth is that there could be nice returns building on the Glam network.

Social browser Flock has announced the launch of a new, customized version of their browser today. The new version is named Gloss and brings together Flock’s browser technology with fashion and entertainment content from over 35 sources. Glam Media, who yesterday announced the launch of their platform, is one of the launch partners. Other content providers include: Glamour, The Budget Fashionista, TMZ, Cosmo, DesignerApparel, PopSugar and others.

Within the Flock Gloss browser, there are news feeds and pre-set favorites along with a pink design (see below). My guess is that we will see a variety of these customized versions from Flock this year as they try to gain market share in the browser market.

Check out all of our Flock coverage including the launch of their Eco-Green and German versions.

Update: Matt Marshall has a good analysis piece regarding the Glam Developer Platform announcement.

Glam Media is announcing the launch of a platform today. Codenamed Atako, the goal is to offer a set of widgets and applications that can be monetized and also offer additional options for Glam network publishers. The new platform is codenamed Atako which Glam describes as, "signify the deep passion that application developers and users feel when they are working with technology that creates change."

The platform is open and Glam will allow developers to build applications for their network of content publishers. Seeing as the women’s demographic is one of the "richest" online in terms of online advertising effectiveness, this could be a huge win for developers overall. The Glam Media Atako platform follows platforms by most of the major social networking providers including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Glam goes after Facebook by noting that their platform isn’t a walled garden — that is, the applications and widgets on Atako are open.

Developers and publishers will share in the revenue generated by their widgets and applications.

The Atako platform is currently in private beta for both developers and publishers. Glam Media reports 77 million monthly uniques across their network of sites and blogs. Check out all of our Glam Media coverage.

Glam Media has announced the acquisition of UK-based Monetise today. Monetise is an online media sales company founded three years ago. Monetise currently represents companies including: Flixster.com, TVGuide.co.uk, and ARTISTdirect.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The WSJ has more details on the acquisition which include a note that the company expects to bring in $25 million to $45 million of U.K.-based ad revenue next year. Overall, Glam expects $100 million in revenue in 2008, growing to $250 million to $350 million next year.

Back in February, Glam Media launched Glam International to focus on markets outside the U.S. Today’s acquisition fits nicely with their plan.

Glam Media, women’s content network, announced this morning their plans to go worldwide into several countries including: United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan. This announcement comes just hours after the announcement of their $84.6 million on half-a-billion valuation; VentureBeat has the details.

Shiny Media, a U.K. women’s network of sites is joining Glam as well today. Glam already has a presence in the U.K. which the company reports is larger than iVillage and CondeNet.

Will Glam use its new white-label social networking tool for part of this expansion? And check out Glam’s new primetime online ad network — I am looking forward to seeing the results of this new concept in online advertising.

Shakeel Mugal is also joining Glam Media as Commercial Director to lead Glam U.K. advertising sales and operations. Bernard Desarnauts, formerly VP Marketing and Products, is assuming the new role of General Manager, Glam International to lead Glam’s global expansion.