Glam Media Quietly Scoops Up StyleMob

Fashion and shopping e-publisher Glam Media quietly bought the street-fashion social media site StyleMob earlier this month.

Founded in early 2007, the community on StyleMob is "really young, vibrant and full of fashion influencers, fashion students, indie designers, etc.," according to a Glam spokeswoman.

All of StyleMob's three employees, including Sasha Cagen, Greg Brown and Adam Souzis, have been kept on as employees of Glam. In fact, StyleMob's co-founder Adam Souzis was just named executive director of Glam Labs, the technology research arm of Glam.

Terms of the deal, which was first reported by industry blog Vallywag, were not disclosed. Last month, Glam raised another $84.6 million in financing, a portion of which it said was earmarked for acquisitions.

The investments valued Glam at approximately $500 million, one source close to the deal said on the condition of anonymity--a hefty valuation for a company that has only been around since 2005.

Glam's network now reaches 25 million U.S. users a month, according to comScore, while the company has been criticized by rivals for driving revenue by selling ads for partner Web sites, rather than for its own page views. The critics also take issue with Glam calling itself a content site, rather than an ad network.

According to its CEO Samir Arora, Glam operates a unique business model--and a highly profitable one at that, as the company is targeting revenue of $100 million by the end of next year.

As a distributed media business, Glam endeavors to support its publisher partners, while remaining the best way to bring premium brand display advertisers to the Web. Actually owning some of those publishing outlets is obviously a growing priority for Glam.

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