Interview: Glam Media CEO Samir Arora: Wrestling With Definitions

As the debate rages on some fundamental definitions on what constitutes the online advertising market(witness today’s testimony in Google (NSDQ: GOOG)-Doubleck anti-trust hearing), San Francisco-based Glam Media is bending and making up some definitions of its own, much to the fury of companies like NBCU-iVillage and others in the woman lifestyle space. I spoke to CEO Samir Arora earlier this week…More in extended entry.

The “media services” company is happy to count the traffic of its ad network sites (a total of 400 publishers/sites now) into the overall traffic for the company, and then has made claims about being bigger than iVillage, the reigning woman’s network online. Now, as Glam expands into other areas, the flamboyant CEO Samir Arora is on the firing range again, claiming that the reach of his network at this point is the same YouTube had when it was bought a year ago by Google (Glam is 18 months old). And with a reported $200 million funding raise about to close, the plans are big: enter into other categories such as entertainment, health/wellness, among others.

I spoke to Arora earlier this week, and wrestled with some of these issues: what is a media company; what is a media services company and how does it differs from just an ad network; how does the company count traffic and compare itself to iVillage and others; the misconceptions about the company; why it considers itself as a tech platform; how it hopes to be EBITDA profitable by the year-end; and others.

He says that about half of the $29.6 million the company raised last year is still in the bank and gone unused. “We have been able to reach both in terms of reach and revenues…in our case, the monetization is not lagging.”

“We are the curator of highest-quality mid-tail content, in which advertising is desirable. So Glam Media has no need for working capital at all. What it says is that in our first two years of operation, we have beaten the revenues of the first four years of Google, which no one ever has in history.”

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Listen in here. (31 minutes, 12.5 MB)

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