En route to BlogHer's San Francisco conference this weekend, which has blossomed from 300 to 3,000 attendees in four years, four mommy bloggers geared up with sponsored cars and EVDO wireless broadband are documenting their pilgrimage. For a conference and a community with a nigh-religious following, many are eagerly embracing their own monetization as a form of proving their girl-powered devotion. Sisterhood, meet syndication. (Photo by Sarah606)

Talking up the ad-network business has had an unintended consequence for Arora: Drawing fresh competition from the companies Arora is seeking to displace. NBC Universal has quietly launched its own ad-brokering operation, the NBCU Extended Network, which places ads on NBC Web properties and third-party sites. Just like Glam, in other words, but without the established brands and sales force NBC has on offer.

Glam's Arora blathers on to Folio about exploiting the "mid tail" and operating a "hub and spoke model." To the extent that there's meaning behind those buzzwords, NBC and other established media operations have figured it out. Which leaves Glam, which is seeking to raise $200 million in financing, with little besides Arora's skills as a salesman to justify its valuation.

It's a masterful mea culpa, the best way to spin bad news. "Few people at NBC Universal are boasting about iVillage now," says The New York Times, which slams the whole iVillage deal as a rather embarrassing affair. The Times chronicles NBC's attempts to latch iVillage onto its existing properties through promotion on the Today Show and the creation of companion TV show "iVillage Live." These failed.

"You assume in the beginning that a mention on the 'Today' show will drive tremendous traffic, but it's not that easy," said Comstock.

You'd think that some folks at NBC would remember NBCi, the company's failed 1990s-era broadband portal. Like iVillage, NBCi found that on-air promotion didn't count for much on the Web. But that lesson clearly didn't stick. And, as with NBCi, which it cobbled together from several Web startups, NBC found that iVillage's technology, far from cutting edge, would need to be expensively updated. So much for providing a platform.

Comstock, of course, maintains that all is now well and NBC has righted its worst mistakes. And iVillage has longstanding relationships with advertisers that NBC has managed not to burn. So the deal can clearly be salvaged. But it's an expensive way to learn things that NBC should already have known.

As a long-time tribe user, and entrepreneur, the NBC deal (if real) indicates a positioning within NBC to cozy up to a more left-wing demographic. In fact, severing their partnership w/MS, investing in YouTube, and grabbing iVillage (with their respective demographic) shows a decided interest in new generation free thinkers at a point in time that the US is starting to realize Fox is a caricature of the Right. Media tends to oscillate in this manner as demographic opportunity presents itself.

This would also sort of align with the rumor that Tribe was looking to bring back Mark Pincus...not that would ever happen logically in a startup environment, but it was clear that the current management did not know how to grow its eclectic user base and instead embarked upon the systematic alienation of those most sensitive to censorship through the implementation of progressively restrictive terms of use (a vain attempt to make the service more acceptable to a new class of advertisers.)

In any event, this is somewhat interesting from a media perspective.

Earlier: Exclusive: NBC is buying Tribe — but why?
Earlier: Rumormonger: Tribe wants old chief back