—Building out e-commerce: For the magazine site, Todd Anderman, HFMUS’ SVP of digital media, sees the e-commerce as an additional way to build on Elle.com’s ad revenue streams; he says ad revenue had fairly healthy growth in the past quarter though he declined to offer specifics. “We have a number of affiliate deals integrated on all our sites with [shopping recommendation site] Stylefeeder,” he says. “We’re looking for e-commerce opportunities for all our brands. We’ve been headed in that direction for some time now. For example, Women’s Day launched an e-commerce function with Coupons.com nine months ago. It just so happened that a lot of these partnerships emerged as the economy turned down, so it does help buttress ad revenues at a tough time for the industry.” Rue La La’s Fischman said that teaming up with Elle made sense, since they both want to keep and reach the same users.

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—The competition: Rue La La is a much smaller competitor to the Gilt Groupe, which last year brought on former Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia president/CEO Susan Lyne to head the company (disclosure: our former CEO Nathan Richardson joined Gilt last month). Rue La La’s bid to challenge Gilt comes as the latter has just raised a huge $40 million round, The Business Insider reported recently (TBI and Gilt share a co-founder in Kevin Ryan).