Glam is Number One Among Women Online
Glam Media, the fast-growing online advertising network of about 450 websites geared to women, has cracked the list of the web's top twenty properties, according to comScore.
More importantly, Glam now is almost twice as big as NBC Universal's iVillage, the leading female-oriented web property for the past decade. Glam attracted just over 29 million unique visitors in February (more than Wal-Mart, Disney, and Craigslist), compared to a little over 16 million for iVillage (which tied with IRS.gov as the 44th most visited sites last month.
The competition between these two online companies interests media analysts because Glam is pursuing more of a Web 2.0 strategy, whereas iVillage still relies heavily on the Web 1.0 destination site model.
"Rather than generating loads of original content or relying on users to create content and community, Glam is raking in ad revenue on the backs of others who do such things," reporter Sam Gustin noted this week. "The company has partnered with hundreds of special-interest sites, some of them very small and others extremely light on actual content, to display its advertising."
On the other hand, iVillage has a stickier platform; its users spend about twice as long onsite as Glam's. One of the reasons is iVillage's smart partnership with popular game site, Pogo.com.
Many of Pogo's online games, including card games like Solitaire, word games like WordWhomp, not to mention its insanely addictive puzzle creation, Poppit, remain very popular among women.