Glamming it up to the tune of $18.5 million

I've got a particular interest in this story because of a project I'm working on at the moment - of which more later.

Glam Media have raised a lot of capital and secured a partnership with Hearst magazines, which is going to do a lot of business for Hearst. Glam claims 8 million visitors a month.

The key is in this quote from Glam's founder, Samir Arora: “In 2004, under 50 percent of ecommerce was targeted towards women and in real life, that’s not the case, it’s more like 80 percent. But when you go online, these magazines’ Web sites have largely been places to drive subscription to the print magazine. So whenever there is a medium change, it’s rare that someone that is dominating one medium also dominates the new medium.”

True. And publishing models like Glam's are presenting real challenges to the old media giants.

edgio has a few interesting things to say about the trend towards new style publishing. The rising foothills analogy is a good one:

"Publisher driven revenue models will increasingly replace middlemen. There will be no successful advertiser driven models in the foothills, only publisher centric models. Successful platform vendors will put the publisher at the center of the world in a sellers market for eyeballs."