Glam Media expected to launch $1b IPO by April

London: Glam Media, a network of lifestyle blogs that has been valued at close to $1 billion (Dh3.67 billion), is close to finalising plans for an initial public offering (IPO) by April, at the same time as it attempts to reconfigure its business using bespoke social networks.

The move closer to an IPO marks an attempt by Samir Arora, Glam's chief executive, to grab some of the social-media halo effect created by Facebook's upcoming flotation.

"People are really the spreaders of content and Glam is a huge beneficiary of that," says Arora, a former Apple executive.

"We are looking at the whole model we have and saying, how can we greatly increase the social discovery of content?"

Glam declined to comment on its IPO plans, but people familiar with the situation said the company is finalising its selection of bankers this week ahead of a planned S-1 filing in March or April, with a view to floating the company in the second or third quarter of 2012.

A similar line-up of investment banks to Facebook's advisers are being considered, including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, the people said.

Glam is best known for fashion and entertainment sites run by small teams of enthusiasts. In December, Glam embarked in a new direction with the $150 million acquisition of Ning, which allows people to create their own social networks.

At the time of the Ning deal, Glam's valuation was $950 million. It has raised about $130 million from venture capital investors to date. Glam's annual revenues are in excess of $100 million and growth remains at above 25 per cent.

Its audience has grown from one million monthly visitors in its first year to 210 million in 2011, almost doubling its audience in two years, recording 2.6 billion pageviews.

Social networks are the leading source of that traffic to Glam's network of more than 4,000 publishers and authors, which is why Arora has begun what he calls the "third phase" of Glam's development into creating its own social platform.

Arora says the first phase of the company when it launched in 2005 was to build a media company based on "social content" such as blogs. Glam aggregated this content together and sold advertising space around it to major brands.

In its latest phase it plans to pitch to consumers directly and encourage them to become "curators" of content through Ning-powered social networks, focused on niche interests from shoes and designer handbags to health tips and film reviews.

— Financial Times