Despite tough financial times, there’s still money around for blog networks, with White Cat Media taking $1.3 million Series A from Greenscape Capital Group. The round closed in August so in part pre-dates the worst of the economic crisis, but certainly things were looking grim when the round closed.
Interestingly the company openly pitched for the round, with details of revenue and what they wanted it for currently listed on Inc.com. Inc also includes assessments of the White Cat Media’s pitch from experienced VC’s which aren’t all that positive.
White Cat Media operates two shopping blogs, MomFinds and SheFinds. The company, established in 2004 employs 40 writers and did revenue of $400,000 in 2007 with projected revenue of “$770,000 without an additional investment; $1.7 million if funding comes through.”
At first glance my reaction was something isn’t right here. Quantcast (direct measured) shows traffic for SheFinds, the larger of the two blogs (by a long way) of 175,000 global page views a month off 84,000 people. That’s nothing short of ordinary for a company that is said to have 40 people writing for it. But the real money would appear to be in content syndication, with Paid Content reporting syndication deals on MSN, Real Simple, XM and Comcast. It’s good money if you can get it, although given the now reported decline in Ecommerce spending and the broader economy driving cost cutting where contractors are often the first to go, its a high risk space to be in. Part of the money is to be used to expand their own content and site range, and they’d want to be driving traffic shortly, because the only thing you can really control in the blogging business is driving more traffic as a hedge against offsets in advertising or content syndication deals, both of which White Cat has a large exposure to.
