NBC Universal Partners with Sugar Publishing for New Blog Strategy

Targeting 18-35 Women, Blog Model Integrates Magazine Approach With New Media

Even as Jane magazine called it quits in July, Sugar Publishing was cementing a strategic alliance with NBC Universal, one that implicitly imagines a future where blog networks can bridge the needs of both television and publishing. While Jason Calacanis' Weblogs, Inc. was sold to AOLand Nick Denton's Gawker Mediaremains profitable and independent, it should be noted that each has niche offerings and neither has the consistent cross-network reader demo offered by Sugar.

Sugar Publishing's collection of blogs grew organically from its maidenhead PopSugar, which launched 15 months ago in the living room of Brian and Lisa Sugar during the Oscar's. Ninety days later, the Sugar's decided to map out an entire lifestyle network for 18-35 year-old women in the form of blogs, securing Series A funding from Sequoia Capital. The Sugars hit the mother lode, stumbling upon a demo that is considered the sweet spot to advertisers. (A Queens College demographer recently validated this, finding that women in metropolitan areas earned 117 percent of men's wages.)

In an exclusive interview with Jack Myers Media Business Report, founder and CEO Brian Sugar attempted to account for Sugar Publishing's meteoric rise. From 1996-2000 Sugar supervised e-commerce for JCrew.com. His central insight: "In the late 1990s everyone said that catalogues were dead. Why print a book when you can read it online? The scary truth is that catalogs became marketing tools, a marketing expense to drive customers to the Website. Today the same holds true for magazines. I've noticed that People and EW have full or half-page spreads about the latest features on their Web site. Publishers need to cut the number of pages to make sure that the magazine's profitable, but bottom line: they have to realize that it's a marketing vehicle just like the J. Crew catalog."

Jon Fine's column in BusinessWeek tips its hat to MagazineDeathPool.com, whose "Grim Reaper" frequently predicts the demise of magazines. With the end of movie mag Premiere, Reaper speculates on the longevity of Entertainment Weekly. Pondering this, Brian Sugar is of two minds: "Who can wait that long for the magazine? When you're at work you want the info now. Everything you've read online – by the time you get the magazine, you've seen the pictures." [Even most famously, those Suri photographs.]

That said, he clearly values content, such as Lisa Schwarzbaum's reviews in EW. "There's clearly a place for magazines and while the advertising pie grows overall, a big portion of it will come from the magazine world. Sugar is quick to credit his antecedents: "We watch Facebook, read Mashable, Digg, and all the tech Websites, and repackage their stuff for women."

Further, Sugar's upfront in stating "Our goal is to be the new media version of Conde Nast; what they've done is remarkable. Pop is our People, Buzz our EW, Fab our In Style, Bella our Allure, and so forth. They have two strong positions: the editorial concept they create on a weekly basis and their advertising relationships. In time relationships will outstrip the former."

Sugar Publishing is particularly keen on mining advertiser relationships. To coincide with the launch of their shelter blog, CasaSugar, William Sonoma's West Elm took their entire product database and loaded it into their platform so that readers could drag-and-drop it into their own homepage; end of month they announced the winner of a wish list. But perhaps the most successful aspect of Sugar Publishing is TeamSugar,, a social networking site that ties all of the blogs together and even drives editorial. If anything, the bulletin boards of the '90s have grown up and are being weaponized.

Sugar points out that while his editors publish 150 pieces of content on a daily basis, his readers generate 10,000 pieces! It's his view that the editor's job is to start the conversation, monitor it, and editorialize it. (Viewing TeamSugar as a place to interact with their customers, Sephora has begun blogging on the platform.)

Not that traditional magazines are sitting on their hands. Texterity, which creates digital editions of magazines, has rolled out twenty magazines specifically for the iPhone ranging from Popular Scienceto Wooden Boat. Wooden Boat? Hearst recently acquired Kaboodle, a "social shopping community." Sports Illustrated's $20 million purchase of FanNation.com has encouraged Time Inc. to roll out enhancements in Peoplemagazine. John Squires, EVP of Time Inc. announced this month that social networks for weeklies would be rolled out end '07 to early '08. But it doesn't appear that online is a cure-all: their Business 2.0 has rolled out editorial blogs even as its ad pages fell 37.7 percent this year through August.

Sugar has some formidable competition in Glam.com, which as of May's comScore ratings has overtaken iVillage as the #1 women's Internet destination and is the Web's fastest growing property. While traffic reporting methodology has been the subject of much debate this month, it is undeniable that Glam has loyal fans. Posters on VentureBeat,which is much more sanguine about Glam's $500 million valuation than TechCrunch, spoke of Glam as a "strong family of related sites, not just an ad network" while repeatedly extolling the virtues of Glam's Network Relationship Managers. (Of the top women's sites, only Conde Nast has, to date, successfully translated its appeal from print to the Web, focusing on developing unique online brands.)

Sugar Publisher's arrangement with NBC Universal provides that its iVillageproperty sell all of its banner advertising across the network. Further, NBCU will take an equity investment in Sugar, and its content will be integrated in brands including Today and iVillage Live. The blog network currently has 4.5 million uniques, 40 million monthly page views and is growing about 20 percent per month. Brian Sugar demured when asked if his content would be integrated within USAand Bravo's programming, but offered that Bravo's president Lauren Zalaznick was joining his board of directors. Might Oxygen or WE catch fire if NBCU buys it, provided that it also gets some Sugar?

Brian Sugar may be contacted at brianjsugar@gmail.com