According to VentureBeat's read on ComScore's May data, new(ish) network Glam.com has taken the top spot for traffic from NBC community proporty and Web 1.0 service iVillage.
Glam has17.3 million unique visits during May, compared to iVillage's 17.1 ; founder Samir Arora says that Glam's network model helps advertisers reach out to female audiences in an increasingly fragmented market. Glam's rapidly growing reach has helped it keep CPM rates up; Arora says the service is now worth $500 million, a nice chunk o change for a media property less than 2 years old.
Susan sez: The women's market is increasingly fragmented, but the CPMs continue to be high; Glam's network model --in some ways not that different from Weblogs Inc--is a next generation way to deliver advertising to women accross a distributed network--the growth of this service is another sign (not that we need one) that the portal model is essentially dead and web companies need to find ways to tap into the new paradigms.
In this vein of distributed, targeted reach, it will be interesting to see how TechCrunch, BlogHer, and BabyCenter grow their universes--and their ad revenue--in 2H 2007.
Glam is a content aggregator in the same category as these entities such as b5media ( http://www.b5media.com/our-bloggers/) and Shiny Media ( http://www.shinymedia.com/about_shiny_media/index.html ), but not as a content producer such as iVillage.
Many blogs on Glam Network site is like this one
http://allieiswired.blogspot.com/2007/06/george-clooneys-secret-fling.html
This blog also belongs to BlogBurst Member Networks, as well as Hollywood Blogads NetworksÂ…..
What Glam's promotion and advertising are doing is CLAIMING that the traffic that it SHARED with other Blog-Networks such as BlogBurst and Hollywood Blogads, and many other blog networks, are truly GLAM's own traffic.
It is murky and perhaps in violation federal and state laws against Fraud and False Advertising.