New media network Sugar Inc has entered the local guide market with the acquisition of the women focused FreshGuide Inc.
FreshGuide offers a city based guides covering four U.S. cities with a focus on products directed towards female consumers, including spas, restaurants, health & wellness and others.
FreshGuide Inc was founded in 2008 by PayPal veteran Ryan Donahue and launched BookFresh the same year, before launching the Freshguide.come site In January 2010.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, although we’re figuring it wasn’t a huge buy: although offering an interesting framework for expansion, Freshguide.com comes in at 171,161 on Alexa; page view figures are not available for the site. Notably Donahue is staying with the company, and mentions that with Sugar Inc on board FreshGuide will have strong support to expand out to 30 cities “in the U.S. and internationally in the UK, France, Germany and Australia where Sugar Inc. has operations.”
San Francisco based Sugar Inc is best known for its PopSugar network of blogs, and in recent years has grown to include the OnSugar hosted blogging platform and shopping site ShopStyle.
