Glam Media, which is mostly an ad network but also owns a group of sites focused on women, is actively attempting to raise $200 million in a private round of financing. The company previously raised $18.5 million in December 2006. The company has hired Allen & Company to represent them in the transaction, and has been distributing a private placement document to potential investors. They’ve actually distributed it a little too liberally - we have a copy and have embedded it at the bottom of this post.
Glam has driven revenue aggressively and say they’ll get to $21 million this year, and $150 million next year. Losses this year are expected to be around $3.7 million.
But the company is driving that revenue by selling ads for partner websites, not on their own page views. A minimal amount of research into their business shows that the company is an ad network, not a content site.
In the private placement document, Glam describes itself in the first sentence as “Glam Media is a Web 2.0 distributed media company that is number one in reach for women as reported by comScore Media Metrix.” I believe this is a perversion of the term “Web 2.0″ (see below - any company this deep in SEO shenanigans is very Web 1.0 focused) and the company certainly is not the largest womens site on the Internet. While revenue growth looks good, Glam isn’t really a content site. They’re little more than an ad network that is claiming the traffic for all of its partners to make it look like a huge womens destination site.
Some worthwhile points are made in the comments, about women-targeted sites and networks and the analytics and finance behind them. I also recommend following the link in the article to VentureBeat for a very different look at the story. There is further information on this topic in today’s NYT article on iVillage, as mentioned by commenter Allison.
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