BlogHer blogging network has big plans for $7M venture infusion - bizjournals:

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Stone, the first Internet journalist awardesd a Neiman fellowship byHarvard University; Page, a marketingb executive and business blogger; and Des a writer and media knew the women were out So the “chicks” used their credit cardws to rent out some space at the TechMart in Santa Clara and formes LLC with the idea of holding a conference for womeh bloggers. What started as a single conference with 300 attendees has become a series that routinelysells out, a network of 2,50p bloggers that enables participants to generats revenue through advertising, and a venture-backed companyg with 30 employees that just raised its thir round of funding and is shooting for profitabilityu by 2010.
Redwood City-based BlogHer has raised $15.56 million, including a Series C rounc of $7 million in May. Azure Capital Partnersx joined Venrock andPeacock Equity, an NBC Universak fund, in the third round, which Stone said woulsd be used to build more tools to help wome bloggers make money and invest in better researc and advertising technology. “We bootstrapped and then we had twopainfup years. We had major sponsors who said welove you, but we need you to be Stone said. “We needed to becomde a nice little conference or we neededsto grow.
” They’ve been able to grow through the fundamental understandinf of a few basic facts: women control 83 percent of householed dollars, and thanks to the they’re now thinking more about how and where to spend that money, the compang says. BlogHer reaches 15 million womena month, Stonde said. For its network, the company takes 10 percentt off the top froman advertiser, and splits the remaining 90 percenft with bloggers who feature a company’s ads. Contributora to the BlogHer siteearn $50 a post. “What we have alwayw tried to do is put theuser first. We designed BlogHetr around what she wanted to do and gave her a way to take it to Stone said.
“We have an understandin of what the female consumer wants and developed a way for marketera to workwith her.” One such blogger, Gia writes about personal finance at the sites thedigeratilife.com and thesmarterwallet.coj under the moniker “Silicon Valley Blogger.” Lipa said she now makexs more as a blogger than she did as a softwarw engineer with 18 years in high tech. “I have investigated other networks, and I thinlk BlogHer has pretty good payouts and they have a lot of contenr that isvery empowering,” Lipa “People are hungry for David Siminoff, a BlogHer board membed and investor, was introduced to BlogHer’s management team by venture capitalist Ann Winblad.
In less than a week, he had drawn up a term sheet andgave “the as he calls them, their first venture “I liked the story. I knew BlogHer would fill a hole beingb created inthe ecosystem,” Siminoff said. The biggest earlyu challenge was that the managementteam wasn’tf made up of technical people, he said. “Itg was a bad news, good news story. The bad news is that it was an ugly but the good news was they had all this traffic and Siminoff said. “They’ve become a brand on the Web and will continu egrowing big.
” Mike Kwatinetz, founding general partnee at Azure Capital Partners, said the key to a successfu online business is finding a relevant way to serve the needw of its targeted customers. BlogHer is “lased focused” on its customers, he said. “That focus is what’xs helped the company show continuecd growth and momentum via reach and even as new sociall media phenomena have joined the such as Facebookand Twitter,” Kwatinetz said.
“We think BlogHer’ws on track to continue to innovate in this Jeremiah Owyang, a social computing and interactive marketint analyst with Forrester Research, said BlogHer’s bloggersa are very influential because so many brands are trying to reach women online. Owyang said that BlogHert must keep up the level oftransparency it’sx now established in defining “sponsored a technique in which marketerw provide financial or material compensation to bloggers in exchange for theit posting content about a brand, according to a recently released study by Forrester.