The site was first launched in 2005 and today attracts 9 million monthly worldwide visitors, according to Comscore, just a little less than Yelp’s 11 million. Both likely have far more actual visitors, but Comscore is good for comparision – in December, for example, Qype told us they had 17.7 million unique visitors. A year ago the company brought in a new CEO and have been expanding rapidly across Europe.

Google supposedly took a look at the company and passed, opting instead to just import Qype’s content. Nokia made a run for the company after Google, with one source saying that a term sheet had been signed in the $50 million range.

But another source says that a term sheet was never signed and the deal negotiations broke down over both price and other contract terms.

Qype isn’t helping much with the story, sticking to their no comments. But founder Stephan Uhrenbacher did email to tell us that the site has 500,000 registered users who’ve left over 1 million reviews. They are available in seven languages and have sites in UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Brazil, Ireland.

So for now at least Qype may remain independent. But like Yelp, which had its own acquisition drama late last year, Qype is in the local advertising sweet spot, where billions of advertising dollars (and euros) will be flowing over the next few years.

Qype has raised around £8 million in venture capital.

Glam’s last major funding was a $85 million combined debt and equity round in early 2008, two years ago, that valued the company at around $500 million.

$10 million – $15 million of this new round will be used to purchase stock from existing employees/founders as well as early venture investors. The rest of the round will be used for investment in the business and strategic acquisitions.

Profitable and Rolling

Glam is also announcing EBITDA profitability on North American operations and break-even results globally for Q4 2009. 2009 revenue was likely around $55 million, up from $40 million in 2008.

The company attracts nearly 160 million unique monthly worldwide visitors to the sites it controls and represents, putting it at no. 14 on Comscore’s top 100 worldwide Internet properties. Those visitors racked up over 2.5 billion page views and 2.5 billion minutes spent on the site. The network includes over 1,400 publishers and other content sites.

Glam attracts around 72 million montly U.S. visitors to its site, more than double competitor iVillage’s 33 million. The company, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley and New York City, is clearly gearing up for an IPO in the next 12 – 18 months.