VentureBeat

Glam Media, the network of women’s online lifestyle, fashion and other blogs, has surged past iVillage in overall global unique visitors, according to Comscore’s latest data just released.

Glam has scrounged up 30 million unique visitors in a single year — an accomplishment that only MySpace, Google and maybe one or two others have done before it (see table below).

We already mentioned Glam passed iVillage on a national basis in May. The global data shows Glam still surging ahead.

The fast growth of women’s sites has sent industry players into a furious bout of acquisition, merger and partnership talks. Yesterday, iVillage, and its parent, NBC Universal Digital Media, announced it had signed a deal with another media network, Sugar Publishing, a San Francisco company backed by Sequoia Capital. They will share content, and NBC will sell ads for Sugar’s content, exclusively.

We’re hearing more, potentially very large acquisition deals are under way.

Brian Sugar, founder of Sugar Media, said his company had 4.5 million unique visitors this month, and that he wants that number to jump to 25 million in coming months. Those numbers sound a tad high, however, since Comscore reported Sugar had only 1.1 million uniques last month (though that number was for U.S.). The deal included an investment by NBC, amount undisclosed, to help Sugar hire editorial staff to produce more content. It is still not profitable.

We’ve been talking with both Glam and iVillage lately about the true status of Glam, its ad and content network and the extent to which its relationship with independently owned sites is strong enough to justify them being included in Glam’s traffic numbers. iVillage suggests Glam is more of an ad network than a content site, and that its ad rates are not as high as Glam claims. However, we’ve done some researching, and we’re not certain this last assertion about ad rates is true. Moreover, leaked statistics last week purporting to show weak revenue at Glam were partial and somewhat misleading, we’ve come to understand after several talks with Glam and others. Jury is still out, but we think we’ll get more clarity at the end of next month…stay tuned.

Finally, ShopStyle, a Los Altos, Calif. start-up focused on social shopping for women, has emerged as the latest company in this area. It lets women browse brands and favorite items, and create style books. The company tracks these styles books, and thereby gets early insight into fashion trends. It then broadcasts these fashion alerts to its front page. This lets its users dictate fashion trends, rather than letting the industry dictate the, the company says. It also offers information about where to get special prices on the trendy items. However, this site is not advertising based, and so is quite different from the companies above. It has angel backing, but names and amount are undisclosed.

Real Girls Media, a new San Francisco start-up that wants to publish content for women, has raised $6 million in a first round of funding.

We reported earlier how another company, Sugar, had raised $5 million, led by Silicon Valley high-profile venture firm Sequoia Capital, after that blog site for women showed considerable traction. So this effort by Real Girls comes is somewhat predictable: You have to raise more than your competitor to lure talent, and because Web 2.0 is bubbly right now, you can do it pretty easily.

The company hasn’t launched yet. Rather, it is constructed in the opposite way to Sugar: top down. This should be a great case study of two polar strategies: Sugar was launched with the grit of a founder’s own money; Real Girls is formed from the comfort of a venture capital firm’s arm-chair: It is founded by Kate Everett Thorp (pictured below), who was a venture partner at San Francisco venture firm Walden VC. Her job was to look for ideas, and so formed a vision on an entirely reasonable idea in this environment — of targeting women of all age groups, offering them ways to submit and publish their views and stories.

Thorp is accomplished, so we don’t want to judge this company until it launches next year. She comes from the advertising side. She launched and sold Lot21 Interactive Advertising Group for a profit — and so her project at Real Girls will likely be advertising driven, as opposed to content driven.

The backing comes from WaldenVC, and another firm, 3i.

The first Web site, DivineCaroline.com, is due to launch in early 2007, is targeted for women aged 25 to 54. Additional sites aimed at other age groups will follow in 2007, and so the multi-blog format is also similar to Sugar’s.

If you detect a note of skepticism here, it’s because we moderated a panel last night at the East Bay SVASE, in which some VCs expressed excitement about online advertising, even though we’ve seen so much activity in this area lately. Sure online ads are roaring, but the hype is causing a bevy of me-too start-ups. See the chart below (via Battelle) for why there’s something real going on. But remember, 1999 was real too.

Every day, new ad-based network start-ups are sprouting up. Did you see our piece on SeeSaw, of San Francisco, which wants to put ads in monitors in train stations? Maybe there really are people sitting around in train stations with nothing better to do than peer at ads.

Final tip to RGM: Might want to replace the grey/beige acronym logo.