The power of a connected audience: Glam Media CEO Arora

An Ad Age interview with Glam Media CEO Arora shows how the combination of good content and social distribution can drive a scale audience.

Mr. Arora: There was a fundamental change in content consumption because of social media. If you look at the sources of traffic to other top 10 companies — the New York Times digital, PBS, CNet, Yahoo and AOL — Glam is the lowest in terms of traffic coming from search engines. A year ago, 17% of it was organic. A year later, it fell to 12%, though we grew by about 30%. This is a telling sign. Our traffic from Facebook grew over 6% and from Twitter almost three times.

So we were founded on the principle of social media. Consumers are not going to very large portals such as Yahoo and MSN for content, and there is a rise of social web and longer-tail media, small micro sites with more voice. That’s the trend that allowed Glam to get where it is.