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Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

Glam Media? #7 in 2013, on the list since 2008. Never heard of them, and I'm struggling to figure out what their deal is. Seems they've recently raised a series G round of funding, and have an array of web properties that I can't really find a list of, the primary ones being http://www.glam.com and http://www.brash.com, which are shockingly useless marketing vehicles that I really can't believe anyone would visit on a regular basis. Anyone have any insight?

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Chlamydia. No wonder they rebranded as Mode Media. Still never heard of them though. Maybe they do bacterial marketing.

They claim to have 406M unique visitors monthly. If that is the case, it isn't shocking to see them at #7, only surprising that a lot of people working and living with tech since forever never heard of them

I'm guessing ComScore combine metrics from visitors across various sub-properties.

Glam properties on Compete:

Glam.com = ~700k https://siteanalytics.compete.com/glam.com/

Ning.com = ~2 million https://siteanalytics.compete.com/ning.com/

Foodie.com = ~307k https://siteanalytics.compete.com/foodie.com/

etc

So these rankings are not based on singular properties. It probably combines Glams other properties such as Brash, Bliss, Foodie, Tend, etc. They have tons.

Which may be fair since Yahoo is a series of sub-properties, although the branding is more consistent than Glam.

Okay that makes sense...I figured that since they were showcasing Glam.com and Brash.com on their homepage, that those sites were a major part of their business, but from those numbers it looks like they're a tiny fraction of their whole network's traffic. I'd be interested in seeing a list of all of their properties.

More companies we've never heard of and that nobody uses? Still sounds like money laundering

So, 3M uniques? Still doesn't make sense even with the roll-up.

Glam Media's heyday was before Google started slamming content networks (thousands of pages of inter-networked and heavily SEO'd sites with little content and loads of ads) with their Panda algorithm update.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_Media

Not an especially informative wikipedia page as it mostly discusses the company's accomplishments with a bit of a PR flavor. No list of their 'over 4000 blogs and lifestyle websites'. Per the wiki, they've raised over $300 million in venture capital and get hundreds of millions of unique visitors...but it just surprises me that I hadn't heard of them and all the info about them just reads like marketing babble.

I do hope they named themselves after the company in Ugly Betty on purpose.

From the article:

> Remember, this is data from comScore... So other metrics may have other rankings.

> We say that mostly because we have never heard of “Glam Media,” apparently the seventh biggest web network last year. Sure, why not?

haha I have never heard of a company getting to a series G round, what is the farthest down the alphabet a serious venture backed company has gone?

Palantir seems to have stopped lettering their rounds after G. Though I'm not sure about the distinction between a $400 million Private Equity raise and a $1.2 billion "Series E" a la Uber

Bloggers use Glam Media as kind of an ad network. I'm guessing Glam Media counts those blogs/sites as part of their own.

Heh, by that standard, Google should be on place 1, and be 10x ahead of number 2, considering half the web is running google ads.

Funny. I had never heard of them either until my sister was offered an internship and I looked them up. Seems they have an enormous network of thousands of websites that, when added together, is bigger than Twitter in terms of page views. It's insane that I could spend so much time on the internet and know nothing about them. I guess it's just not targeted to me.

Me too. I was like, who the heck is that? And then I searched and found them... and I'm like... I don't think I've ever even heard of any of their properties before. Would love some insight into who is visiting their stuff...

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