Hello Martin

So TechCrunch and Venturebeat is writing about Glam trying to raise $200 million, i have known for a while that they’ve been looking at additional capital, but did not know they where looking for that much.

Basically from my understanding pretty much all of that money would go towards acquiring websites within their network, and removing the % they pay them. If Glam is the correct company to do that i do not know, having looked in to this space for a couple of years i do find the move rather interesting overall though (independent of company whom does it)

The online women’s space have grown massively last 2-3 years and there is more sites popping up all the time with high quality content. However a lot of them don’t focus on monetization because it’s simply a hobby, which in Glam’s case makes the acquisition cost a lot cheaper.

And here in lies one of the big possibilities but also potential downfalls, Glam would be buying websites for it’s content publication which would mean the people would need to stay on and continue writing the content, that’s all fine but they can drop out at any time after whatever contract period is set to run out.

I think Glam is thinking that they can bring in and increase earnings per user, not only by CPM but placing ads at the correct place, and using affiliate programs more effectively, and then interlinking the different websites for a complete offering.
(The Knot have a bit of a similar strategy with their different web properties, ps The Knot has one of the most impressive earnings per user i’ve ever seen for a web company)

In the PPM that Glam has put out there is something which does baffle me a little bit:

“Revenue grew from $94,000 in the first quarter of 2006 to $1.6 million
in the first quarter of 2007. Glam is in its initial growth stages and is building up its sales force. Q2 2007 revenue is $2.2 million, a 38% sequential quarter-over-quarter growth rate.”

And then they expect to be doing $21 million in revenue this year? i honestly just don’t see where that growth would come from, i could see them hitting close to $15 million, but without any acquisitions i heavily doubt they would be able to hit that estimate.

HomeAway (raised over $200 mill, and bought top 5 vacation rental sites) is probably the closest you can get to what Glam is trying to do, the big difference in buying vacation rental websites was that the revenue stream already existed, and you weren’t dependant on people in the same way as Glam would be.

We’ve also seen consolidation likes this before but in a more spread out manner foremost thinking of Internet Brands who just filed a S1 preparing for IPO, and Demandmedia who will most likely file for a IPO sometime next year, and i would guess once Glam would do over $150 million in rev they would file for IPO to.