Samir Arora, the brash founder of the women’s-oriented ad network Glam Media, one of the fastest-growing Web properties in the U.S., thinks his critics—specifically, longtime category leader iVillage—don’t have a leg to stand on.

“They’re sore losers,” says the 42-year-old Arora, who has founded and run several businesses, including software firm NetObjects, in the past. “They had been No. 1 in reach in women for the last decade, but they really had no anticipation that there would be a new entrant in the market that would exceed it.”

Since it was founded in 2006, Glam Media, an online advertising network of about 450 female-oriented websites from shopping site Allbabydeals.com to Zafu.com, a site about jeans, has quickly grown to become the Web’s most popular site for women, according to comScore. In February, Glam’s network attracted 29 million unique monthly users, compared to iVillage’s 16 million. And investors have taken notice—in February, Glam announced an $80 million venture capital investment led by German media conglomerate Hubert Burda Media that values the company at more than $500 million.

By the Numbers

¹ Based on latest round of investment

² Purchase price in March, 2006

Since when does an ad network constitute a threat to major brands on the Internet? Deborah Fine, the president of NBC Universal’s iVillage, argues that her company has a more “authentic” user base that spends plenty of time on the site and has built up a strong community. And it is these kinds of users, Fine maintains, that advertisers are most interested in reaching.

Although Fine would not disclose the average C.P.M. (cost per thousand impressions) that iVillage charges advertisers across its sites, industry estimates put the figure at $25 to $35. Glam Media, on the other hand, says it charges $8 to $15 C.P.M. rates for its partner sites and $15 to $35 for its owned-and-operated sites (iVillage executives privately question whether Glam really gets such high C.P.M.’s for its traffic). Yet Glam, even with the lower rates, has become a contender in the race for female attention on the internet.

“We’ve had our business model which has worked for over a decade,” Fine says. “We respect that [Glam Media has] a new approach, albeit very different from ours.” Numbers from comScore bear out her claim that iVillage’s content is stickier than that of Glam’s—according to the latest data, iVillage users spent almost twice as much time per day with the site compared with Glam’s—10.9 minutes versus 5.8 minutes. 

  But that hasn’t stopped Glam from generating big ad dollars from its traffic. In 2007, Glam had revenues of about $25 million, while this year its revenues could top $100 million. According to Arora, revenues have increased between 50 and 150 percent sequentially every quarter since the company was launched. “[Glam] is one of the fastest growing media companies on the internet, not only in reach, but also in revenue, that has ever existed,” Arora claims in his typically hyperbolic manner.

And some Web advertisers prefer the look and feel of Glam’s sites to those of iVillage. “Glam feels edgier than iVillage,” says one online advertising executive who asked not to be identified. “iVillage feels a little old already.”

To Arora, iVillage’s approach reflects an outdated way of thinking about online content and how to make money off of it.

iVillage and its parent, NBC Universal, have not grasped “a basic change in users of the Web,” Arora says. “Users are preferring to go to multiple sites, as opposed to a few known brands like iVillage or Yahoo, which was the case in Web 1.0 ten years ago.”

To critics who point out the uneven quality of the content across Glam Media’s sites—typos are common on some sites and one popular site is Dogster, a social network for dog owners—Glam’s backers say that some of Glam’s advertisers are willing to occasionally trade off content quality in order to reach large audiences.

“A lot of these are one-person-type websites,” says Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, a general partner at Accel Partners, one of Glam’s venture capital investors. “And a lot of our advertisers are willing to forgive typos and things like that that don’t get updated as [often as] they should.”

Not having to create so much original content is also a better business model, says Ranzetta. 

“We have about a dozen people on the content editorial side, and I think they [iVillage.com] have five or ten times that,” says Ranzetta. “We’re willing to try to forego some of the aesthetics and layout.”

For its part, iVillage refuses to get involved in a shouting match with Arora and Glam, even while it subtly questions their approach of relying on partners to increase traffic, as opposed to growing it internally.

Fine says that her company builds its traffic “the good old-fashioned way—in other words, organically—and that’s what has really worked for this business for a really long time.”