Sugar the San Francisco site for women’s content, will announce tonight it has acquired Coutorture, a network of about 230 websites and blogs.
It’s Sugar’s second purchase in two weeks (see our coverage of its acquisition of Shopstyle), and helps boost its traffic at a time when there are questions about it. Comscore showed Sugar’s traffic has remained at slightly more than 1 million unique users, though Sugar says its traffic is still at 5 million. Sugar recently gave up on an idea to create an ad network for women, saying there was no value in it. This was surprising, since another site, Glam, is offering such a network and reporting strong revenue growth. Online content for women is growing quickly, and ads are likely to come, so we’re not certain what to think on Sugar’s call there — though its true that there are plenty of ad networks around and it may be too late to start another one (we write about new ones every day, including a couple of hours ago). Sugar chief executive Brian Sugar has said he is now focused more on being a content site, and this latest acquisition underscores that. (Note: Techcrunch’s post on Sugar is quite bubbly).
A central Coutorture.com site serves as a hub for that company’s network, which focuses on things like clothes, beauty tips and fragrances. A price wasn’t mentioned.
Julie Fredrickson, founder of Coutorture Media, will remain editor at Coutorture. Here’s an article about how Fredrickson has the pushiness to get in people’s faces: Crashing the Celebrity Catwalk Party.
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Sugar actually moved to acquire Coutorture several weeks ago. Sugar did not say how many uniques Coutorture has.
Sugar is backed by NBC Universal and Sequoia Capital with more than $15 million, says it is profitable and has $12 million in the bank.
