Yes, friends, a major web property has NOT launched an ad network! Perhaps owing to the fact that the number of ad networks has crossed the 400 mark, the Sugar blog network (PopSugar, BuzzSugar, etc. etc.) has instead decided to launch a free blogging platform called On Sugar. Tech Crunch broke the story.
The feature list is impressive, particularly if your subject matter is pop culture/fashion/style celebs. From their site:
Key Platform Features:
- 10 different post types: (text, gallery, spread, poll, quiz, quote, link, chat, video, & audio)
- Free access to a hundreds of thousands of Getty Images®
Fun drag and drop "spread maker". Create your look with thousands of fashion images from hundreds of online retailers through ShopStyle, e.g. ShopBop, J. Crew, Net-a-Porter, and others.
- Build your audience of followers with automatic notification of new posts
- Follow your favorite sites and view an aggregated feed of your followed sites
- Multiple sites per account
- Multiple authors per site
- Easy import from Blogger, Wordpress, & Typepad
- Full domain support
- Free
Key Site Features:
- Drafts/Timed Publishing
- Search
- Archives
- Pages (e.g. About Me, Galleries, Videos, etc)
- Widgets for highlighting content from your site or around the web (e.g. Popular Posts, Latest Comments, Latest Tweets, etc)
- Related posts from your site or, if you choose, from sites you follow
- Completely customizable themes
Technologies:
- Drupal - open source content management system
- Akamai - Entire platform uses the Akamai content delivery network
- memcached - Extensive use of memcached
- Smarty - Template engine
- sIFR - (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is a technology that allows you to replace text elements on screen with Flash equivalents.
- TinyMCE - Rich Text Editor
- LLMP - Linux, lighttpd, MySQL, PHP
- Fully documented API
The free platform, which enables the bloggers to join Glam or other female targeted ad networks, enables Sugar to monetize these sites through deployment of the ShopStyle Widget. ShopStyle links fashion, culture and celebrity to a buying engine that puts replicating looks and participating in trends at the user's fingertips.
Now, Sugar may yet intro an ad network, but at least for now they seem to be abstaining for a while. It makes sense at least until there is some shakeout in the network ecosystem.
Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.
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