Though it’s an old story and we have seen the story on a number of blogs, one post has made me think over it again. The blog network Popsugar recently received $5 million in funding from venture capitalist, Sequoia Capital. Sequoia is the same VC that has made several wins over the years. Sequoia Capital has provided venture capital to Yahoo, Google and YouTube in the past and the investments proved to be unbeaten. Sequoia made good bucks when Google agreed to buy YouTube for $1.65B.
While many blog networks like b5media and Weblogsinc have been funded by VCs earlier, it’s not a new thing. But, when a VC like Sequoia has invested in Popsgar, we need a hiatus and think once more over it.
What is Popsugar?
Many blog networks are targeting niche market at the moment. Likewise, Popsugar is a blog network with its blogs targeting women mostly. No doubt, women-specific blogs covering the topics like celebrity news and gossips are able to attract tones of readers. I may be a bit biased here but the Celebguru blog at Instablogs too garners a good readership. If Sequoia has funded Popsugar, it simply means that the celebrity blogs are capable of drawing a good number of visitors and hold a good value for the VCs
What makes Popsugar different?
If you take a look at the figures, 13M page views and 1.5 million visitors per month will not look like a big deal. But, considering the fact that Popsugar is targeting a niche market i.e. the women or the readers interested in celebrity gossip, the figures set Popsugar special. Moreover, these visitors are unique and loyal. Other than the beautiful page designs, Popsugar has a well-built social network of its own. It is offering its users some very cool social networking tools to interact with each other. Social networking is capable of attracting a number of visitors to a blog network. Social networking is one of the main grounds on which Popsugar stands different. No doubt, a VC like Sequoia knows the potential of social networking.
Many social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook etc. have turned out to be successful although the fact that they are not producing any good content, we can safely say that they are producing crap. But the reason that such sites are highly successful is that they know how to turn that crap into something good. On the other hand, blog networks are at an advantageous position since they are producing really good content. Moreover, it’s quite easy for a blog network to jump into social networking owing to its own well-built community. Readers are at ease since they are provided with a preset direction. The blog networks based on social networking have the real strength to hit the market with the bang.
