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An Idea Whose Time Had Come

2002: The Idea of Glam is born and starts to take shape. Esther Dyson, at PC Forum gives the founding push: "Well, don't just stand there talking about it—go make it happen."

The work on social networking starts—six degrees and small worlds and how what we love connects us.

Early work in social networking—Jerry Michalski is one of the pioneers who leads some of the discussions; The Cluetrain Manifesto by Doc Searls fuels the open source movement.

2003-04: The founding team starts building the first version of Glam in a retro-modern Victorian home in the famous Haight-Ashbury district on a quiet tree-lined street called Downey in Cole Valley. Taking inspiration from the great Japanese magazine revival (Magazine Designer Collective) and the social networking revolution taking root in the United States, a multi-industry team converges with a view of the future.

The team decides to focus on the emotional, aspirational feel of print magazines and their rich heritage as a model.

Some of the founders leverage the work done for 24 Hours in Cyberspace, incorporating the learnings in Web publishing over the past 12 years.

Seed stage, then series A are led by Information Capital LLC.

The founding team comes together, bringing a rich history of transforming Internet and media.

Susan Kare, former icon and font designer for the Macintosh, professes her love for magazines and dives into designing pages that bring the emotive feel of print online.

Fernando Ruarte, who built one of the first content management systems, starts creating the architecture of the inner core of the Glam Hub.

Raj Narayan, who holds the first patent on Page Layout in HTML, starts to think about an all-new Web-publishing platform.

Dianna Mullins, who has worked with Samir Arora three times in the past, joined within five minutes after she hears about the company.

Vic Zauderer, Rebecca Bogle, and Emmanuel Job come together, along with Ernie Cicogna, who had helped the process from the start to help create a new company called "Project Y". ("Project X" was taken by In Style magazine when it launched, so we were told.).

Jim Bryer gets the idea in two minutes on the phone, "Aha—content focused in context by consumers.". He introduces Doug Galen at eBay, who gives the final push ("You have to invest in this!") at the historic Buck's eatery in Woodside. (This is the fourth startup with Bucks in its history for the founders.)

Phil Schlein, USVP, Apple, and former president of Macy's California, puts it in simple terms ("The next stage of media is bringing entertainment and engagement to the consumer") and joins as an adviser.

Theresia Ranzetta independently targets the new media space Glam is going after as "key opportunities" at Accel and is instrumental in helping the team define the strategy, focus, and need in the marketplace, at a time when Silicon Valley is not focusing on consumer Web.

Carl Portale, former publisher of Elle and Harper's Bazaar, joins Glam.

Karen Edwards, former head of marketing at Yahoo sets the right direction ("We have to be a marketing partner for the brands.").

Anna Zornosa, formerly of Women.com/iVillage, joins as adviser; Erika Lenkert starts as first executive editor; Nicole Sargent starts as the merchandising editor, and along with Maggie Canon, builds the founding editorial team.

Completes $10 million in series B led by Accel, with DFJ and Walden VC; Theresia Ranzetta and Tim Draper join the board; Art Berliner joins as an observer on the board.

2005

The Glam team decides to focus on the contextual combination of content with brand advertising— this leads to the realization that the Web is still very young as a medium. In real life more than 83 percent of all purchases and 85 percent of all advertising is directed toward women. In 2004, women represented less than 50 percent of the total e-commerce spending on the Web.

In 2004, the team decided to focus on women as the initial primary customer.

The next decisions made were regarding the type of content/context and the type of advertisers to target. Interestingly while we all want to Tivo the TV ads, glossy magazines had a very balanced content and brand advertising mix. In fact, the MPA numbers told us that the "mix" between content and advertising was a tight range and that print magazines represented 17 percent of total advertising.

There were several aha's from this, the Web represents about 4 percent of total advertising, mostly (more than 70 percent) search or direct. Network/Spot TV and brand print magazines represent the two largest mediums- at 18 percent and 17 percent respectively— with TV declining faster than magazines. As the Web grew, it seemed clear that there would be three types of advertising:

Glam decided to lead the revolution by building a media company that would bring brand advertising to the Web. The goal was to move brand advertising from the 17 percent in print and 18 perecent in TV to the Web.

What we also liked about the magazine model was that the consumer self-selected the magazine and the mode they were in. It is not unusual to see someone pick up In Style, Vogue, US Weekly, Dwell, and Marie Claire— each of these is a unique combination of content, advertising, entertainment, and engagement. Our goal was to bring this level of context to the Web, by simply focusing on content by type: fashion, beauty, and lifestyle. The narrower we kept our focus, the better the context was for the consumer.

The third major decision we had to make was the level of focus— the experience of having helped launch the first generation of social networking was that while the page views were very high, the effective CPM's were very, very low. Looking deeper into this, it became clear that we needed to somehow separate the mode the consumer was in— directed search mode, content engagement, and utility (e-mail, messages, comments). We found that in directed search and content engagement, having the right ads was a benefit, while in utility mode they really were in the way. Think about the different reactions a user has if a Pepsi ad comes flying by when the user wants to check e-mail versus the reaction when an ad for a handbag appears when the user is reading about handbag trends. With this realization came the focus on advertising that needs to be in context to the page/story/article—and this set Glam completely apart from the other platforms. At launch, Glam had the top brand advertisers as a part of the basic experience and continues to vigorously defend against not respecting the consumer's intelligence and time by serving "hit the monkey" ads.

This led to the next decision we had to make: What level of content and advertising should we focus on? Glam made the decision to help make fashion and style accessible and focus on the appropriate premium and luxury advertisers.

Lastly, the most difficult decision was to come just before launch: What kind of media company would we want to build? With the rapid increase in both the mid size publishers and the long tail of personal publishing and talkback, it did not make sense for us to build a new type of portal—that is, repeating what the traditional media companies and the Web 1.0 models tried. Here came the hardest decision— the one that felt like jumping off a cliff—and accepting that control in itself was what actually needed to change.

Almost all media models we could find had the notion of control deeply imbedded in their core—editorial control, publishing control, distribution control. Here is where we found the biggest "cultural" divide—new media companies like MySpace and YouTube were glaring examples of what is truly happening in consumer media today, where the user is firmly in control. The problem we saw with this model was inherent in many Web 2.0 websites: great transformation and growth, but with unclear monetization. In fact, the more we spoke to the indie publishers, the more we heard that the current model simply did not work for them.

Here is a great link on this by Keith Teare: http://blog.edgeio.com/?p=57. In his terms, Glam would be one of the first websites to build a media company focused on the rise of the foothills (indie publishers) and the growth of users visiting hundreds of websites, while many Web 2.0 companies were going after the flats in the long tail.

With this, Glam started to build a platform that would bring it all together—a destination website with the best content from Glam editors, major publishers like Hearst Corporation, magazines like Dwell and Nylon, the best indie publishers, and user-generated content. In the end, the focus was to build what users really want—the glossy top editors' picks and content from the indie publishers' blogs and to look at what other users are talking about.

And pulling it together is what Glam started to do: the first contextually focused new media company helping to bring content and brand advertising together from different sources—major media companies, indie publishers, and consumers together with a hub that provides services to publishers and consumers.

Making Fashion and Style Accessible

How does a Silicon Valley new media company become number one in fashion? We started with people who had a fundamental love, appreciation, and passion for design. The next step was to bring in the experts: Carl Portale, former publishing director of Harper's Bazaar, Elle, and several other leading magazines joined Glam. Erika Lenkert, from In Style magazine, started the focus on style. Robbie Myers, editor of Elle, provided early guidance. Avril Graham, fashion and beauty editor at Harper's Bazaar joined as editorial director to oversee the fashion coverage. And Tracey Anderson, AOL home page editor, started as executive editor.

With this team, Glam reached out to a long list of editors, stylists, and experts: Carmindy, Melissa Ceria, Nicole Dorsey, Karen Robinovitz, Stacey Mayesh, Zoe Wadler-Schaeffer, Melissa Schweiger, Dara Fleischer, Amy Gurvitz, Terri Clarke, Susan Sommers, Elycia Rubin, and Kristin Larson.

Stylemakers: Alexis Vogel, Anastasia Soare, Ann Dexter-Jones, Betty Halbreich, Bobbi Brown, Brenda Kinsel, Cameron Silver, Casey Lewis, Dean and Davis Factor, Eva Jeanbart Lorenzotti, Frédéric Fekkai, Heidi Sabelhaus Myers, Jessica Paster, Jillian Dempsey, Kendall Farr, Lisa Rinna, Mark Townsend, Mia Kim, Michelle Madhok, Negar Ali, Paul Starr, Phillip Bloch, Tia Williams, and Tracey Ross.

September 19, 2005: Glam launches at New York Fashion Week and at Demo Fall. Reaches more than 1 million page views and 100,000 visitors in first week of launch.

Lisa Stone (BlogHer) solidifies Glam Media's thinking about the growth of independent websites and blogs with the creation of the Glam Publisher Network along with Catherine Levine from New York Times Digital.

October 2005: AOL and Glam sign partnership.

November 2005: Glam helps launch ABC's The Bachelor online.

December 2005: Glam launches Glam Publisher Network, the first network of style websites and blogs for content, advertising, links, and network marketing.

2006

February 2006: Nanette Lepore is the first top fashion designer to blog Fashion Week live on Glam.com.

April 2006: World's number one women magazine Cosmopolitan partners with Glam.

September 2006: Glam vaults to number one in fashion online, enters comScore Media Metrix top 10 women's properties list.

October 2006: Glam reaches more than 7 million unique visitors a month, with over 80 million page views.

November 2006: Joanna Coles and the editors of Marie Claire are the first traditional editors to blog Fashion Week in Paris and Milan live on Glam.

December 2006: Jarl Mohn, chairman of CNet, joins and invests in Glam Media.

December 2006: Hearst Corporation signs content syndication deal with Glam Media.

December 2006: Glam Media closes 18.5 million in series C funding.

2007

March 2007: Glam Media enters comScore Media Metrix 100.

April 2007: Glam Media reaches more than 12 million unique visitors a month in the U.S. and 22 million worldwide.

May 2007: Glam ranks No. #1 in comScore Top 10 women's properties

June 2007: Glam strikes multi-year ad deal with Google.