Glam’s Not A Sham
August 13, 2007 by Christina Jones
Filed under Beauty, Friends of eBeauty Daily
Oy, how people love to stir up *schtuff.* I am about to go all techie on you folks, but just briefly, so kindly bear with me, and if you love Glam as much as I do, please feel free to say so (and if you don’t, you’re probably not reading, but feel free to comment as well). So here goes me with my .02:
The history: TechCrunch and VentureBeat have attempted to go all undercover on Glam and expose what they see as fraudulent numbers that Glam is using in their attempt to raise more capital. They also accuse them of using black hat SEO (search engine optimization) techniques, using sites that have nothing to do with Glam and/or women in their numbers, and other shady insinuations. Both sites accusing Glam have relationships with Sugar Publishing and/or Federated Media, who are in competition with Glam.
My view:
TC and VB are trying to make Glam out to be nothing but a shadow of what it says it is.
All numbers aside, the fact remains that they have hundreds of very happy members making money and enjoying their part of being involved in Glam. Glam is a fun place to be involved with for its members and a useful destination for their readers. They have great and growing traffic, and are driving good traffic to their member blogs who in return are driving traffic to Glam. They have exclusive opportunities for their network members, and have really done a fine job at keeping a group of women with very loud voices happy. Their advertisers are high quality and relevant to the sites they advertise on. If their members aren’t happy, they can leave – some have, as is the ebb and flow of doing business, but most are happy and haven’t. While I sure can’t speak for anyone but myself, I can safely say I visit and participate in Glam sites a great deal more than iVillage sites – Glam is to me more cutting edge and Web 2.0, and iVillage more old style web – so hands down, Glam is certainly number one for me.
If Glam wants to grow via capital investitures, this is how they do it – investors want numbers, so they give them. You can’t measure and compare numbers from one business model to another and come out with anything that is fair for everyone. There is no denying that Glam’s members include the vast majority of the top beauty, fashion and celebrity properties across the web, providing them with a massive reach to the women on the web. According to their Comscore numbers they are number one, according to other numbers they are not. Which set would you use if you were them? And if they are masters at SEO – good for them – we could all learn a little from them. All of the top web properties are masters of SEO, obviously, and this just makes them a more valuable property from the eyes of investors.
Success = Quality + Quantity + a dash of good luck, Glam has all of those going for it. Boys, your bias-cut slips are showing. 
And that’s about all I have to say – thanks for listening. Back to our regular programming.
Technorati tags: glam.com, techcrunch, sham, beauty, fashion, comscore
How sad – people seem to love tearing down successful, whether it’s successful people or companies. I love blogging with Glam and wish them all the best!
This sounds like the process IGN went through years ago.
Step 1)
Get a whole bunch of affiliate sites. Tie them into exclusive ad contracts. Use the affiliate sites as a source of traffic to promote the core site. Occasionally push some traffic to the affiliate sites to keep them happy.
Benefit to affiliate sites: more ad revenue than they can probably generate themselves. Occasionally get bits of traffic from the core site.
Benefit to Glam / IGN: free promotion from a whole bunch of affiliate sites.
Claim aggregate traffic from all affiliate sites as being their own, so they can say “wow look how big we’ve grown in such a short amount of timeâ€.
Step 2)
Use resources to consistently produce better content than the affiliate sites, thus retaining more traffic. Make sure all high paying CPM ads go to the core company owned sites. Keep paying affiliate sites enough to keep them happy and to prevent them going to another network.
Step 3)
Once you’ve built up enough traffic, start letting affiliate sites go. Or in IGN’s case, if the ad market dips and you find yourself locked into unfavorable contracts, simply stop honoring the 3-5 year contracts by ceasing to make payments to the affiliates. By this stage the affiliates have quit their full time jobs to focus on their sites, believing they have a secure contract and are getting paid to do what they love. For this reason I suggest affiliates always have a Plan B.
Step 4)
Affiliate sites close down or go bust. Network traffic isn’t really impacted by much, because by now most people go to Glam.com / IGN.com as that’s the url they’re used to seeing plastered all over the affiliate sites. IGN / Glam site keep all high paying ad inventory on their now much bigger core sites.
Step 5)
Sell out or do an IPO. Founders become rich. Affiliates that helped them get there, get nothing.
Having been through the whole IGN experience myself I can see this happening again. Mind you, if I owned Glam, I would probably do exactly what they’re doing now. You can see why
While affiliate sites might say they are getting ‘good traffic’ from Glam, it’s probably nowhere near as much as the traffic they are sending back to Glam, or at least is equal to the value of the brand recognition Glam gets from sticking the Glam logo all over affiliate sites. Also, yes things are all nice and rosy now, while CPMs are high and affiliates are getting good support because the company can afford to pay for an affiliate manager to talk to the affiliates. But what happens when CPMs dip, the affiliate manager loses her job as the company tries to cut costs, sites stop getting paid? I’m not saying this is going to happen, but what if it did?
Hi Michael – you’re definitely right in a lot of your points. Businesses come and go every day, failing for a lot of different reasons. It boils down to me knowing what I am doing and accepting the risks. CYA is the only way to go in my opinion – don’t put all your chickens in one basket. And don’t ask me to sign an exclusive agreement unless you’re BIG willling to pay for it.
Glam has not done that to me – they have been great partners to have, and I hope they stay that way. I think they will. So far, things are sunny and bright, and we are all on an upswing, and they are attracting wonderful advertisers and traffic that are beneficial to both of us. I feel the relationship at this point is very symbiotic, and I think b5media as a whole feels the same way. Blogging in this niche is rewarding in a lot of different ways, not just in advertising revenue, and Glam understands that in a way that other advertising networks don’t. Maybe they will start, maybe they won’t – who knows. I just keep my seatbelt tightly fastened – Web 2.0 is a wild ride. 
Thanks for your time and comment, Michael!