Shiny Media

Wayhey - we've gone all community. Shiny now has its first very own social network via its Who Ate All The Pies footy blog which we have developed in collaboration with Tagworld. Just click on the button market 'community' and you'll be whisked away to a place where you can create your own page, start you own debate and upload your favourite football vids and images.

Not all the functionality is live - so it is in cough, cough, beta - but I think it illustrates that blogs and community sites can live happily together.

We are working on some very clever community type stuff for our wedding blog Bridalwave and will soon have some interesting things happening on our fashion blogs.

Ok, so I don't want to labour the point, but... I went back and checked our traffic figures for six months ago in February.

Unique visitors - 1,754,954 Page impressions - 2,619,855

compare this with August

Unique visitors - 3,521,976 Page impressions - 5,379,535

Which in my book means that we have doubled our traffic in six months. Ok, so we have launched several new blogs in that time, but most of the growth has been around established blogs like Catwalk Queen, TechDigest and Who ate all the Pies? What could be really exciting is that if we double our traffic again (and given that we are approaching the busiest web months of the year this is a strong possibility) we will have hit 7 million readers per month. This is an astounding figure for a UK company, especially given that we didn't really exist two years ago and also that we haven't spent a penny on buying Google Ad words.

Following hot on the heels of our latest Club Pies launches, our Scrumbag relaunch and Who Ate All The Pies' spiffing new redesign, Shiny Media today announces the launch of its blog dedicated to women's football - Kickster.tv.

With the women's World Cup just days away, Kickster will bring you all the latest news in the lead-up to the tournament, plus expert match reports as the cup progresses. After that it'll be back to the domestic season - which was dominated last year by Arsenal Ladies, giving poor fans of the male Gunners something to cheer in an otherwise trophy-free season.

Edited by Carrie Dunn, who has been writing for our cricket site The Googly for some time while also making contributions to The Times, The Guardian and thelondonpaper, Kickster aims to show that women's football can be every bit as exciting as its male counterpart. Carrie is ably assisted by Georgina Turner, winner of the 2005 "New Online Journalist of the Year" award, who has written for FourFourTwo magazine and also contributes to The Guardian.

With professional women's soccer slated to relaunch Stateside in 2009, plus next year's Olympics to look forward to, there's plenty to indicate that women's football is set to continue the growth which has seen it become one of the most popular sports among women in the US.

Stick with Kickster for all the best coverage!

August is usually a bit of a rubbish month for websites as many would-be surfers are otherwise engaged basting themselves on European beaches. So it is a tad amazing that in August Shiny posted its best ever figure of 3.5 million visitors to its sites.

To put that in some kind of perspective that's up 700,000 readers on July. If we keep up this level of growth those BBC online execs should start to worry sometime around 2011.

There are some obvious reasons for the growth. We have had a few technical problems of late most of which were resolved in July. Also we launched five new footy blogs and have seen some wonderful organic growth on sites like Bridalwave and Kiss and Make Up.

So let's hope that four million user figure isn't too far off.

Also we have also just signed a huge sponsorship deal (our biggest yet) and seen ad revenues start to rocket. Good times indeed!

Shiny launches the Shiny US blog network with Shiny Style and Shiny Gloss.

Are we bonkers? A couple of weeks back I told someone that we were on the verge of launching a blog network in the US. They told me that I was trying to sell ice to the Eskimos. Mmm.

Over the past few decades many Brits have tried to crack America. Some like Simon Cowell have charmed our transatlantic cousins with his high buttoned trousers and snarling sarcasm. Others like Oasis, Ainsley Harriot and have been back in Blighty with their tails between their legs.

So is Shiny stupid having a crack at the US? Well we are actually already in the Cowell camp stateside as many of our blogs boast strong and devoted US readerships. None more so than our fashion blogs Catwalk Queen, Shoewawa and The Bag Lady all of which featured in a top ten fashion blogs read by American survey conducted by FashionIq. Needless to say they are well clear of any potential rivals in the UK.