Mode Media

» see modemedia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Glam Media started in 2003 and put its fashion site live at New York Fashion Week in September 2005, half magazine and half storefront. The site was never really the business. The business was the network behind it: thousands of independent lifestyle bloggers, each too small to sell advertising to a brand on their own, pooled into one audience that could be sold as a single buy. Glam handled the sales and the ad serving, picked which posts got promoted, then split the money with the writers.

Done at scale, that arithmetic produces a number large enough to change how people treat you. By 2007 Glam had passed iVillage on unique visitors. The parent company renamed itself Mode Media in 2014 and kept adding properties. In 2015 comScore's media rankings put it seventh among all internet properties in the United States, ahead of Twitter and ahead of LinkedIn, and it was the only private company anywhere in that top twenty. Forbes ran a piece that year on the company hollering for respect it could not get.

Respect was not the problem. Mode Media had raised about 186 million dollars in equity and roughly 245 million once the debt was counted, from Accel and DFJ and Hubert Burda Media and a dozen others, and all of that was borrowed against an initial public offering. In 2013 it was valued near a billion dollars while preparing for one. The IPO never came, and by 2015 the internal valuation had been marked down to 725 million.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the number that was the business ~

A hundred and fifty million monthly visitors sounds like a fortress and was closer to a treadmill. The audience was aggregated, so it was never loyal to Mode, it was loyal to individual bloggers who could leave. The revenue it produced was display and native advertising, which was being repriced downward every year as Facebook and Google took the direct-response budgets. In 2015 Mode did over a hundred million dollars of revenue against over a hundred million dollars of expenses.

Thirty US staff went in a round of layoffs reported that same year. The company went looking for more money in 2016, and by then investor appetite for a thirteen-year-old pre-IPO ad network with negative margins had gone.

~ the collapse ~

On 15 September 2016 a memo circulated internally saying Mode was closing its doors, that day, with essentially no notice. Employees learned it the way the press did. Recode had it the same afternoon, CNBC the following morning, under a headline about a company that used to be worth a billion dollars. FashionNetwork's version described a thirteen-year-old business shutting abruptly. Nobody had arranged a wind-down, and no buyer was standing by.

~ who did not get paid ~

The creators were the ones left holding invoices. Mode's network was somewhere around twelve thousand people, many of them beauty and fashion bloggers for whom this was actual income rather than a side project, and a lot of them went on Twitter that week saying they were owed thousands and had no idea who to ask. Some were owed for months of work. The trade press covering the beauty industry picked it up precisely because the people affected were the industry's own writers.

The thing that makes this worse than an ordinary insolvency is that the bloggers had no contract with the brands whose advertising they had been carrying. Their counterparty was Mode, and Mode had stopped existing between one morning and the next.

~ the brand outlived the company ~

Glam kept going as a name because a name is an asset that survives the company holding it. BrideClick acquired the assets in 2017. Static Media, based in Indiana, bought Glam from BrideClick in 2023, and glam.com today serves beauty and fashion articles under a line about having been around since 2003. The domain modemedia.com, meanwhile, no longer resolves to anything at all. Two companies have now owned the brand that the dead company built, and neither of them owes anybody from 2016 a cent.

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