The Social

Could an initial public offering be on the way for the highly ambitious Glam Media? The Valley-based advertising and media company has hired a new chief financial officer, Stephen E. Recht, who was the CFO of photo-printing site Shutterfly when it went public in 2006.

Recht replaces Ernie Cicogna, a co-founder of Glam. Cicogna will remain with the company as executive vice president of Glam Partners and general manager of the Glam Publisher Network.

"(Glam) has perfected a unique media business model and established itself as the leader in vertical content networks online," Recht said in a release. "I'm looking forward to the opportunity to contribute to the company's continued upward trajectory."

That could mean a few things: on one hand, an initial public offering, but on the other hand, Glam could have recruited him simply because it needs to make more money. With an advertising recession looming and talk of dot-com doom spreading all over the Web, Glam could just be getting down to business. For obvious reasons, a financial crisis isn't the greatest time to go public; Glam is also rumored to have gone through a round of layoffs earlier this fall.

That said, Glam (and its colorful CEO, Samir Arora) is known for its audacity. The company first made its name as an ad network on fashion and celebrity gossip sites, before branching out into everything from eco-living to African-American lifestyle to the luxury market. It's raised an astonishing amount of venture capital, has stocked its executive ranks with veterans of both print publishing and Silicon Valley, and was at the center of a rumored billion-dollar buyout offer.

Depending on whom you talked to, that buyout offer was either a fake rumor started internally to drum up Glam's market value or a savvy pre-IPO move. And that's the bipolar perception of Glam in both the tech and advertising sectors: some think it's the future of the industry, whereas skeptics see it as a big, drawn-out case of pride before a fall.

But now it looks as if there's one ex-Shutterfly executive who's betting on the former.

Glam Media, that digital-ad company that keeps expanding beyond its original base of celebrity gossip and fashion, has launched a new section: Glam Luxury, targeting high-end brand enthusiasts and the ad dollars that love them.

At launch, the headlining advertiser is (you guessed it), Swarovski, the jewel manufacturer that spawned a zillion awful iPhone cases.

So far, there are 35 participating sites geared toward affluent audiences that have agreed to be part of Glam Luxury and run its ads in exchange for some perks, like syndication in a Glam e-newsletter and access to a revenue-sharing video platform. Among the third-party sites are BlackBook.com, Travels in Taste, and Luxique, as well as existing Glam participants such as Apartment Therapy and Refinery 29.

It might seem a little bit silly, even tasteless, to be launching a luxury brand ad network in the face of a serious economic crisis, but Glam's stance is that Glam Luxury should actually help. Pinpointing audiences still willing to splurge on jewelry, handbags, and vacations, the company said, will be financially efficient and ultimately help profits.

"Glam Luxury is more relevant for luxury marketers than ever before," Joe Lagani, Glam's vice president of brand sales, said in a release. "The words, images, and thoughts that surround a luxury brand must reflect the current times, with a speed and adaptability the high-end marketer requires. Glam Media provides marketers with the right audience, environment, and reach, and enough flexibility to change with marketplace dynamics."

But perhaps in a sign of economic belt tightening, Glam hasn't hired a new "editor" for Glam Luxury, as it has with new content areas launched in the recent past. Instead, Glam Living's editorial director, Erika Lenkert, will oversee Glam Luxury as well.

Glam Media, the female-oriented advertising and blog resource firm that has stirred both conversation and controversy in Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue, plans to announce on Thursday a "channel" for blogs geared toward African American audiences.

Called Glam Black Life, the new content area joins existing channels like fashion, beauty, entertainment, family, and the most recent addition, "wellness." Like the others, Glam Black Life serves ads on blogs that have been accepted into the network, and see their content featured on the Glam.com homepage and e-mail newsletter. And like other Glam niches, Black Life is headed by executives with backgrounds in traditional media: director Tamera Reynolds, a former executive at Honey magazine, and ad sales chief Asten Morgan Jr., a former sales executive at television network BET.

The debut advertiser for Glam Black Life is automaker Lexus, and a number of sites that cater to African American women have signed on as network members, among them Afrobella, YBF, and The Blay Report.

Glam remains a topic of contentious discussion in tech and advertising circles. It's partially a reaction to colorful and ambitious founding CEO Samir Arora, partially due to executives' insistence that they aren't running an "advertising" company, and partially because there still isn't full industry confidence in its business model--a professed old-media approach to content on the Web.

But it's undeniable that the company has seen an impressive trajectory over the past year: a steady stream of press releases have announced $85 million in venture funding, acquisitions, international expansion, and executives plucked from Google.

Glam Media has continued its international expansion, appointing former DoubleClick and Excite executive Yukihiro Yamamura as CEO of its Glam Japan division. Glam Japan hasn't actually launched yet, but is slated to go live later this year.

Yamamura had been head of DoubleClick Japan previously, and before that he had been CEO of Excite Japan since 1999.

"The appointment of Yukihiro Yamamura is a strategic addition to the Glam team as we continue to leverage the fragmentation of the Web globally," Glam CEO Samir Arora said in a release Monday. "With an accomplished background in online advertising and operations from DoubleClick and Excite Japan, Yamamura brings local expertise that will be invaluable as Glam Media expands its position as the leading vertical content network."

Flush with venture cash, Glam has been growing like crazy--hiring former Google sales executive Michael Adair as vice president of corporate development and finance, acquiring overseas properties to help fuel international growth, and launching new divisions.

One thing's for sure: Glam Media isn't letting that $85 million funding round sit around and ferment.

The latest of many announcements from the don't-call-it-an-ad-network media firm is that it has launched a "Wellness" division, opening up its ad services to sites in the health, fitness, and "green" niches.

With hippie food brand SoyJoy as a sponsor, Glam's Wellness channel has already ushered in about 20 sites that deal with "mind-body-spirit, empowerment, and a healthy planet," according to a release Monday. Among them are BeThree, Conscious Living TV, Ecofabulous, Low Impact Living, and Spaparazzi; two others, Natural Solutions magazine and Earth Pledge, will also contribute content to the Glam.com hub that the company runs.

Glam has been on a roll recently, with high-profile hires, acquisitions both domestic and international, and new advertising strategies that have left some thinking that it's the future of the ad industry and others wondering if it's just a big pink package of Valley hype.

But launching a health-and-living vertical, besides being the trendy thing to do, is part of Glam's planned expansion beyond strictly targeting women, something CEO Samir Arora alluded to in a talk at the EconAds conference earlier this summer.

Crunchy, Prius-driving yoga types are a fairly different demographic than the one most of Glam's current sections target: fans of celebrity news, fashion, beauty, and the like.

Next stop: Glam for dudes?

Glam Media has always insisted that it's not just an ad network, and an announcement the women's-focused media firm made Monday underscored that.

Glam has launched "Glam Today," a daily newsletter featuring a selection of content from the more than 500 sites in its network of independently run blogs that serve the company's ads.

"Glam Today surfaces and highlights some of the best content created daily by the professional publishers across the Glam network," Ryan Roslansky, Glam Media's vice president of products, said in a release Monday. "Glam Media's focus on packaging display advertising with relevant content extends is core to everything we do and extends to our premium e-mail products like Glam Today designed for publishers."

It's a five-day-a-week affair: Monday's newsletter will focus on fashion and shopping, Tuesday's on beauty, Wednesday's on "living," Thursday's on entertainment, and Friday's on health.

It's a bit surprising that Glam hasn't launched something like this before: for the parent company, it's another outlet for ads, and for sites in the Glam network, it's more exposure, as well as, perhaps, the cozy feeling that they're part of something more than a plain old ad network.

There are plenty of e-mail newsletters focusing on the women's market, though. DailyCandy has been around for years and is extremely popular, though it should be said that its newsletters focus primarily on women in select U.S. cities, and Sugar has a newsletter called (wait for it...) DailySugar.

Other popular online newsletters have primarily female readerships, like Vital Juice Daily and Ideal Bite (just acquired by Disney).

When Glam Media raised $84.6 million in February, international expansion was on its radar, and now we're seeing the results: the women's-focused ad network announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Monetise, a London-based digital-ad sales start-up.

(Yes, that's British spelling.)

All Monetise employees will become part of Glam under the deal, financial terms of which were not disclosed.

"The acquisition of Monetise speeds our entry into the important U.K. display ad market," Glam Chairman and CEO Samir Arora said in a release. "Monetise has strong relationships with London advertising agencies and enables Glam to immediately increase its reach in the U.K. market." Additionally, some of Monetise's in-house technology will be worked into Glam's platform.

The 3-year-old Monetise, which specializes in entertainment advertising, serves display ads on sites such as Flixster, ArtistDirect and the U.K.'s TV Guide. Those sites will become part of Glam's U.K. Entertainment division; Monetise co-founder and CEO Joel Cymberg has been appointed Glam's publisher management and operations director, and co-founder and sales director Jon Walsh is now Glam's entertainment sales director.

In recent months, Glam has acquired fashion social network StyleMob, launched a revenue-sharing video platform, and become the subject of a quintessentially Silicon Valley hot-air debate over whether it had really gotten a billion-dollar acquisition offer.

NEW YORK--Glam Media CEO Samir Arora showed up at ContentNext's EconAds conference on Tuesday afternoon looking dapper in brown leather shoes and a hot pink tie to match the handkerchief in his suit pocket. But really, he said, he runs a frugal company.

On his company's recent $84.6 million funding round, he said in an onstage interview with ContentNext's Rafat Ali, "We've really not spent that in anything so far." He added, "If you look at our history, we've raised $29.6 million to date before this round...we used less than that to get to be the reach we were with the revenue curve we have, so I think the company has been very efficient."

After the new round of money, he was equally cautious. "I did a hiring freeze," Arora related. "Everyone had to justify even the people they (already) had. My belief is that's when you develop the bad habits."

But some people in the audience were likely skeptical of Glam's shipshape condition, since the hype about the advertising and women's media company is some of the most controversial in the Valley--and Arora himself has proven to be a firebrand. Last week, rumors swirled around the D6 conference that Glam had slighted a $1.3 billion acquisition offer from an unnamed buyer, and then another set of rumors started to fly that Arora had started the rumor himself to prettify the company's image (and valuation).

Regarding that, Arora said in Tuesday's talk, "We don't talk, even comment on speculative rumors." But then Ali asked him how he'd respond to a theoretical $1.3 billion offer, and Arora expanded, "Flippancy aside, you have to look at all serious offers."

He continued, "This is not our first time around at this and we take these things pretty seriously, but let's move past rumors."

Glam Media CEO Samir Arora

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks)

One thing that Glam will also be moving past, if Arora's wording is accurate, is an exclusive focus on sites targeting women. "We actually chose women as our first target," he said, talking about how Glam initially served ads on a network of fashion and beauty sites before expanding to entertainment, "lifestyle," and health. A new family and parenting niche had been announced earlier on Tuesday.

More gender-neutral or male-focused categories, like news and politics sites, are under consideration. Glam also recently launched a revenue-sharing video platform.

Arora maintains that Glam has been successful because it applies the tried-and-true principles of old-media magazine advertising to the digital realm. "Before you open the magazine, you know and trust the content and quality of advertising you're going to get," he said of "well-packaged" publications. He considers Glam to be the online equivalent.

He said that most ad networks have the wrong idea by focusing on the ad space that publishers can't sell through their internal sales operations. "Most companies have been very focused on remnant inventory," he said. They're good for cheap ads, he said, but not Glam's high-end ambitions. "Glam is very clear about that. When we started the company, we only wanted above-the-fold, what we call 'prime time' and prime targeted inventory." The company has since expanded but still requires participating sites to exclusively use Glam for their above-the-fold (i.e. before you hit the scroll button) advertisements.

Some hail Arora's vision as the future of online "big-media" advertising. Others criticize him as a snake-oil salesman and claim that he can't say he runs the largest women's network on the Web by counting the audiences that see Glam-served ads. But it's tough to deny that the controversy is netting quite a bit of press for Arora and his company.

So is his signature personal style, which he swears was shaped by Glam itself. "I did not own a single thing pink. (Glam) took me to a transformation."

Glam Media has always been adamant that it's not just another ad network, something it reiterated when it announced a revenue-sharing video platform for its member sites this week.

But apparently, some big company really thinks that Glam's something special. Amid the gossipy deal making of the D6 Conference, someone at tech money blog VentureBeat heard that Glam had just received a $1.3 billion acquisition offer that it plans to turn down.

The reason it plans to shug off the offer, according to VentureBeat, is that Glam's investors--which include Accel Partners and Hubert Burda Media--"see a bigger opportunity for Glam to build a large business for high-end display advertising." That might mean an initial public offering.

So who is the spurned suitor, if VentureBeat's report is correct? I don't think it would be Google or Yahoo--or Microsoft, for that matter. My money's on a big "old media" company, or possibly a massive ad industry player looking to expand its digital footprint.

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