Glam Media Launches Glam Wellness Vertical:
Mind-Body-Spirit; Healthy Planet and Empowerment

EatingWell, EarthPledge, EcoFabulous, Natural Solutions Magazine, Lifescript and Others Join Glam Wellness Channel; SOYJOY is Launch Sponsor

SILICON VALLEY, Calif. and NEW YORK—July 28, 2008—Glam Media, Inc., the
pioneer of vertical content networks and number one in reach for women online, today announced the launch of Glam Wellness, a new vertical encompassing mind-body- spirit, empowerment and a healthy planet. Glam Wellness provides brand advertisers, including launch sponsor SOYJOY, with access to women passionate about wellness. More than 20 Web sites and publishers have joined the Wellness vertical, within the Glam Publisher Network of 640 sites, where Glam Media will represent their premium ad inventory. In addition, Natural Solutions Magazine and Earth Pledge, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting sustainable practices, both joined today as content partners on the Glam Wellness channel on Glam.com.

Launching with more than 3 million uniques, Glam Wellness is the fastest-growing premium wellness vertical network. Sites joining the Glam Publisher Network include: BeThree.com; Conscious Living TV; EcoFabulous; EatingWell; Lifescript; Low Impact Living; Spaparazzi and others. Glam Wellness is the most recent channel to launch in the Glam Media vertical content network, which brings together premium media content and 640 publishers to give advertisers a unique and diverse platform for brand engagement with their target audiences.

“Natural Solutions Magazine is excited to partner with Glam Media to inspire and inform readers (both online and in print) who care about well-being and healthy living,” said Rob Lutz, President & Group Publisher, INNOVision HEALTH MEDIA, Inc. “Glam’s Wellness channel brings together a premium community of Wellness publishers and content for consumers.”

“The premium Wellness sites and sought-after publishers in the Glam vertical content network offer brand advertisers both incomparable reach and the right environment,” said Joe Lagani, VP and GM of Glam Wellness and Glam Living. “Glam’s Wellness channel enables brands to reach a premium wellness audience on the Web and to connect with women seeking purpose, balance and healthy living.”

Glam Wellness will be overseen by Joe Lagani, former publisher of Conde Nast’s House & Garden and is run by Glam co-founder and Wellness Director Rebecca Arora. Glam Media’s vertical content network now features six separate channels, including: Style, Living, Entertainment, Wellness, Health & Family. Each channel offers a distinctive blend of original editorial, media partner content and curated content from the Glam Publisher Network. Glam facilitates the building of businesses for its hundreds of publishers by allowing them to focus on creating content and engaging their audiences while Glam Media’s vertical network connects branded display advertisers with the online audiences of the sites in the Glam network. Glam Media interfaces with a handpicked network of publishers and managed vertical networks to provide a host of media services such as display and video advertising, content syndication, advertorials, search and other applications.
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About Glam Media
The founders of Glam had an epiphany about what it would take to bring brand advertising online –to niche and premium Web audiences. Today, Glam Media is the fastest growing Top 20 Media Company in the U.S. With a total reach of nearly 41 million unique monthly visitors in the U.S. (comScore Media Metrix) and 77 million global uniques, Glam Media provides a compelling mix of owned & operated web sites and the carefully curated Glam Publishing Network of more than 640 popular and influential lifestyle Web sites, blogs and magazines. For premium national brand advertisers, Glam Media offers an unprecedented array of reach and targeting that are singularly attractive to both upscale and aspirational consumers. Glam Media is backed by Hubert Burda Media, GLG Partners, Accel Partners, DAG Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Walden Venture Capital and Information Capital. Glam Media is based in New York City and Brisbane, California.

The process is ably helped along by the Wall Street Journal, which breathlessly and inaccurately describes Glam both as a network with "450 partner sites" and as a destination site, in fact "the most popular women's site in the U.S." By glossing over the difference between a low-margin ad network and a Web publisher, the Journal serves as a mouthpiece for Glam's slick chairman and CEO, Samir Arora, who ends the article with a self-serving quote: "This will be the year that Glam goes global." Has he run out of suckers domestically so soon?

Namely, that Glam might be talking to European private equity firms. The kind, our source explains, that has more capital than sense, an eye on the sinking dollar, and a tendency to start funding conversations with American entrepreneurs by asking, "What would you do with $80 million?"

The theory goes that a European firm would buy Glam, pump a couple hundred million dollars into inflating its traffic with guaranteed revenues for new partners for its ad network, tighten the revenue share on older partners to get them thinking of selling out, buy those blogs to increase Glam's owned traffic from about 3 percent of its network to maybe 30 percent, and then flip the whole thing to an old-media behemoth desperate to make an online advertising splash with Glam's coveted female demographic.

Don't believe the bit about Glam lowering the CPMs it pays out to its partners in order to make them vulnerable to buyouts? Some Glam partners worry it's already happening. A partner tells us Glam used to pay $20 to $30 CPMs for premium ads and $7 to $10 for run-of-network ads. Now they pay $7 for the premium stuff and $2 for run-of-network "garbage." For Glam's publishing partners, these sources say, it's getting harder to sustain a business on Glam ads, and it's getting ever more tempting to sell out.

We hear that many Glam partners who want to sell have to offer themselves to Glam first, under right-of-first-refusal clauses. Industry watchers say Glam learned these tactics when it hired Richard Rocca from hardballing ad network Gorilla Nation.

Take the conspiracy theories with a grain of salt. Some of the CPM shrinkage is the result of Glam's increase in size. Selling inventory, it used to be able to go straight to marketing departments, which tend to spend more for less. But now a run-of-network buy on Glam costs so much that it exceeds the amount marketing departments are allowed to spend. Buys have to go through agencies, whose media buyers watch out for clients like Procter & Gamble by refusing to pay more than a $7 CPM. Just business, in other words — but Glam signed up those websites on the promise of better economic terms.

Even if Glam's partners are wrong in their suspicions, the very fact that some believe Glam's business model is so flawed it has to cheat to win begs the question: Who — other than more investors who want in on the shady action — is going to pay $1.3 billion for that kind of company?

Breaking News! During a deep investigation, we found Google's most media-saturating executive hiding in plain sight on the cover of Newsweek that's been out for days. Marissa Mayer's anti-biometric face-morphing technique ensured that millions of web programmers would stream right past her in the checkout line. God she's advanced.

It's hard to make out the details, but if you examine the demarcated area, and squint real hard, you'll realize OH MY GOD IT'S HER.

Newsweek cover [Wausau Daily Herald]

My god, is there anything this woman thinks she can't do?

On the upside, Lucky did up Marissa to look like a star. Marissa, if you're reading this, please keep your hair like that and buy only vintage 50s wear. (And pearls. Lots of pearls.)

Lucky Magazine [Official site, these pages not available]