Glam is more akin to a TV Network and its publishers work as its channels. The other networks such as Blogads and Blogburst and Yahoo amount for little revenue, at least in my case and some of the bloggers I know. The MAJORITY of the revenue and prime display and video ads are managed by Glam.
And Ads aside, Glam also does content, links, and unique advertising programs with the publishers. I don’t know of any other network that does that. If you can tell me of another network that can give me money, promotion, make me feel like part of a community AND provide content I can use once in a while then I will consider switching. I am not sure how comscore works or who you are referring to when you say “Regarding Glam, we are not talking about how Glam pays its bloggers/partners heavenly sums for its share of advertising revenue to keep them happily coralled within its networks. They should. Why not?”. I am not a huge blog so I do not get paid a heavenly sum of money, however the compensation I get is much better than any other network I have tried and the ads much better looking.

Comscore’s report lumps media properties targeting “women” in one category and ranks them. Their errors are twofold. The first is in ranking many very different media categories in one meaningless benchmark. It should have at least broken it down into sub-categories such as Media Aggregator and Media Creator. Media Aggregator being an entity aggregating the majority of content for which they don’t own the copy-right, such as Glam. Media Creator being an entity that owns the copyright of its contents. Another red-flag is that Comscore only measures and reports traffic for companies that are its clients. The double-counting issue would be more apparent to industry constituencies if Comscore measured all of the publisher properties, not just a subset of the Internet (i.e., clients of Comscore). The other blog networks such as Hollywood Blogads, which shares visitors with Glam, might not be on the radar screen if these networks were not the clients of Comscore. It is an industry phenomenon that awaits a solution, a code of conduct…or regulation.

Regarding Glam, we are not talking about how Glam pays its bloggers/partners heavenly sums for its share of advertising revenue to keep them happily coralled within its networks. They should. Why not? The issue is that Glam aggressively nudges the two irrelevant indicators to create a story for its business valuation! In this blog entry “chief executive Samir Arora said he saw Glam headed toward a $500 million valuation, based on the value of comparable companies.”… The only number Samir used to compare Glam with iVillage is the Comscore’s visitor number. But, the truth is that each visitor of iVillage’s website brings 10x or 50x more advertising dollars than that of Glam, the reason being that iVillage owns all ad spaces associated with the webpage and/or visitor. On another hand, Glam Network’s bloggers webpage’s ad spaces are offered to multiple blog networks, as well as Blogger’s direct advertisers. This reduces its earning potential to at least 1/10 of iVillage’s. In additional, for each advertising dollar Glam receives, Glam has to pay a big cut to its bloggers. Glam only earns the advertising broker fee/commission fee in a sense for brokering the advertising sale to its bloggers.

Glam’s aggressive advertising and promotion is heading toward pumping up its valuation for acquisition or IPO. Sounds familiar! The Bubble is here! Or a deja vu of the ERRRRRON, the one that shall not be named. VCs are jumping onto the bandwagon to perpetuate the myth because they expect a windfall from their investment. However, at the end of day, after a few opportunistic players exploit the hype of uncorroborated reports, average consumers, future stock-holders, and Internet professionals are the ones who suffer from the aftermath of the economic bubble…. a roller coaster Internet business climate.

I am not suggesting that Glam is doing anything wrong. Far from it. based on the partner feedback on this posting, they seem to be doing a lot of things right. That’s great.

If Comscore has a completely messed up methodology in capturing traffic, by all means Glam should go to town with it. That’s not their fault, nor should Glam be bashful about taking those numbers out for a media spin. However, once they do aggressively tout those Comscore numbers, then dissecting them is fair game.

Many blogs on Glam Network site is like this one
http://allieiswired.blogspot.com/2007/06/george-clooneys-secret-fling.html

This blog also to BlogBurst Member Networks, as well as Hollywood Blogads Networks….. 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 pehaps in violation federal and state laws against Fraud and False Advertising.

first, your argument about comscore measurement is wrong. if you look at the above example, you will see that gorillanation.com is shown to have 29mm visitors in may 07. gorilla nation is an ad network. do you think 29mm visitors are going to a static ad network corporate site (google page count – 464), or that the banners and ad units that are being run are making calls to an ad directory of gorilla nation and comscore is registering those visits? i’m sure member sites like sheknows.com (#7 on the women’s list) signed over their traffic to gorilla nation.

second, directly related to the glam metrics, comparing the content of a directly owned site to one that is simply signing traffic over to someone else is comparing apples and oranges. Look at the sites in the glam network – the content being counted as “glam” is sidebar contextual advertising and possibly some sidebar content units. this is much different different than what has historically been considered “in network” in terms of traffic count. just because someone signed over their traffic doesn’t make a fair comparison. sure, ivillage should be making this point, and that’s their fault. however, people should at least consider these numbers in the proper context.