CHRIS TRYHORN | GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE

Samir Arora thinks he has found the secret of making money from web advertising.

While traditional media companies struggle to turn their brands into cash, his company Glam Media has come from nowhere to invent a new model based on creating a network of shared content.

Glam - a ‘vertical network’ of some 1,300 websites - has come a long way since it started in the US in 2005.

It launched in the UK in June last year and is now present in Germany and Japan.

It attracts 110 million unique users every month, mostly to its women’s interest network, which has overtaken NBC Universal’s iVillage to become the top-ranking women’s network in the US and UK.

It also runs a similar network for men, Brash, and Tinker, which aggregates news from Facebook and Twitter.

Yet Glam employs just 210 people, of whom 20 are in London.

It doesn’t need a vast army of content creators because other people produce so much of the material on its network.

Links from the Glam.com site take readers to many other sites and blogs, including fashion blogs m y f a s h i o n l i f e .

c o m , toptipsforgirls.com and Brent Hoberman’s home design site mydeco.

com.

Glam, whose backers include Hubert Burda Media and GLG Partners, sells advertising for the sites that have joined its network and shares the revenues.

It sees itself as a curator, not a creator of content and its technology allows it to distribute co-ordinated advertising across its network.

Indian-born Arora, 43, who started out at Apple in the 1980s, likens Glam to a cable company: “Someone else produces [content] ... we package it and distribute it to consumers.” To do that requires a handle on cutting- edge technology, hence the need to be based in Silicon Valley and hire graduates of Yahoo and Google.

Arora points out that Glam has done no marketing to get where it is, nor is it a company that relies on search engine optimisation to draw people in.

He says it’s all about offering the content that people are searching for, either yourself or through other sites in your network: consumers search online for a particular topic and in an era of fragmentation they are not that bothered about where they find it.

“There’s no regard to the brand of media company: I don’t care if it comes from the New York Times or someone you don’t know,” Arora says.

“Instead of launching a property and driving users to it, we look at what the needs of consumers are and where they want to go.

We reverse the sequence of publishing.

We look at all the places with high-quality content and make these people part of our network.” Arora is scathing about how old media companies have approached the internet, relying on brands that have little purchase online.

“What the magazine and TV publishers have found is that just because you have a brand in a magazine does not mean any of your readers will go to your website online.

It’s probably one of the big reasons why Glam has won.

Vogue has no relationship online.

It has a 3 million to 4 million circulation in the US, yet actually their website only gets about 400,000 visitors, even with their brand and marketing.” The problem stems from publishers adapting their traditional business to the internet and not approaching it as fundamentally different, Arora says.

“Traditional media companies who are bent on holding on to the notion that the internet is an extension of their business have all failed and will continue to fail.

The internet is a new medium; as a media company you should have a separate division that focuses on the internet.” He praises Rupert Murdoch’s Fox for keeping its divisions separate.

Arora believes old media will survive the internet age, but will have to get used to a smaller slice of the advertising market.

“I do recognise just like radio was the No 1 medium 50 years ago but is no longer No 1, print newspapers, magazines and TV used to bring in a certain percentage of total spend.

I believe that’s over.

No question.

Advertising spend will continue to go up, the size of print businesses will be smaller [but] there will be thriving businesses.” The advent of Craigslist has put paid to any newspapers that used to rely on classified advertising.

“The classified business is over,” says Arora, with brutal simplicity.

“There’s no money left in that.” The world’s reputable news providers do have something going for them, he concedes.

“In news, having a brand does bring you some validity on the internet.

The New York Times is a very serious property.

However, the New York Times is not even in the top five news sites on the internet.” But Glam, which has raised $100 million since launch, has not been immune to the advertising downturn.

Although Arora says the company grew its revenues by 50% this year, it has put the brakes on expansion plans.

He is confident, however, that planned expansion into France, China and India will be a success, even in these difficult times, as 30% of Glam’s users are in countries in which it has no presence.