'06
Top gossip and fashion blogs are members of the “Glam Network,” a celebrity and fashion site that partners with blogs with the promise of advertising revenue from ad placement. The Glam Network is scamming fashion and gossip bloggers into giving them massive free advertising in exchange for a small link on the Glam website and the promise of ad revenue which never materializes.
The Glam Network lures bloggers with exclusivity and .50 cents a click. After applying to join, your blog might get approved about a month later and you’re sent a lengthy contract that states that Glam will pay you .50 cents a click for third party ads, which they can swap out with ads for Glam.com at their discretion. This sounds like a decent deal and it seems better than the payout for AdSense or CrispAds.
Glam never explains the contract in simple terms, and there are no Terms of Service or FAQs for Glam Network bloggers on their website.
In order to finalize your membership you’re required to place one Glam ad, either 160×600, 300×250, or 728×90 on your site, along with a small Glam membership logo and a 160×200 Glam “Module” which features content from Glam. Most sites choose the large 728×90 vertical banner, assuming they’re getting .50 cents a click.
Here’s the relevant part of the contract:
The thing is – Glam doesn’t give any payout for its own ads, and third party ads are rarely, if ever, seen. It also doesn’t offer any real time statistics or network blog control panel. Get this – you have to e-mail them to request statistics and then take their word on it.
It is incredibly rare to see a third party ad on a Glam Network blog, and the Standard Blog Contract states that Glam can swap out the ads with free Glam ads at their discretion.
Celebitchy was approved for the Glam Network and we signed the contract this week. We got suspicious after we realized that we wouldn’t receive any paying ads for a while, and that there were no statistics available.
Our contact at Glam e-mailed us:
I answered:
When we checked, only one Glam network blog had an ad that wasn’t for Glam.com. We e-mailed with a top gossip blog that gets a huge amount of traffic and they said that they’ve had Glam ads up since April and only saw a third party ad appear occasionally at the beginning of this month, June
No one has ever been paid by Glam that we could verify. That same top gossip site told us that they’ve never seen a dime from Glam despite having their ads up since April.
Two other gossip bloggers told us they assumed they would be receiving .50/click for the huge ads on their site from Glam, and did not realize that there was no payout for Glam.com ads.
Glam is a much worse deal than CrispAds or AdSense because you don’t get paid for every click – you get paid when Glam decides to throw you a bone, but they haven’t paid anyone yet!
Glam might continue to get away with this because bloggers are afraid of being sued. The contract that we signed states that we have to give Glam 90 days notice before removing their ads.
We suggest that everyone who thought they would be receiving .50 a click for Glam ads remove them immediately.
To be fair, they did withdraw our contract without penalty when we requested it a day after signing up.
Once Glam tries to sue us for reporting this, we’ll let you know. We’re not going to take this down if they threaten us.
Update: One blogger claims to have been paid “not much” in March, but another e-mailed us to ask if we’d been paid, and said “Have you gotten paid yet? Not just told how much you’re getting paid, but have you actually gotten paid? I haven’t and it’s been over a month.” We only had Glam ads up for a day, so they’re never going to pay us.
