After four years of focusing exclusively on tech products and publishers, we are thrilled to share that StackCommerce will now be offering our native commerce solution to lifestyle publishers, launching with a stellar list of partners including AskMen, theCHIVE, Digg, Rant, The Awesomer, Everyday Carry, and over a dozen others. These new partnerships expand our reach to more than 200 million unique visitors per month, and open an entirely fresh commerce opportunity to current and future partners.
We would also like to officially introduce Citizen Goods, our brand new lifestyle marketplace featuring curated modern products across home, outdoor, grooming, everyday carry, and apparel categories. Citizen Goods is the destination site for our lifestyle-focused partners that prefer an affiliate solution rather than an integrated Shop. To support Citizen Goods, we’ve also launched amazing new product features that allow for further customization of Shops with adjustable homepage heros, content modules, fonts, and navigation. With more advancements in the pipeline, we will continue to deliver innovative ways for our partners to truly personalize the look and feel of their Shops.
Native commerce is clearly resonating with tech and lifestyle audiences, as our member community within our network of Shops grew by 250% to more than 2.5 million members over the past year alone. The overall effectiveness of Shops is also increasing, and we’re proud to see publishers averaging six-figures of gross sales annually, and top partners generating well into the seven figures. This demonstrates the proven success online media sites have found with native commerce as a new and incremental way to monetize their content.
We believe this expansion comes at an ideal time for lifestyle publishers given the rise of ad blockers and decreasing effectiveness of banner ads. The key factor is that truly native commerce works not only from a financial standpoint as an alternative to ads, but also adds brand value by turning readers into loyal buyers who appreciate access to exclusive commerce content. With native commerce, we also eliminate the need for publishers to manage operations, shipping, sourcing, and customer service so they can focus on creating impactful content for their readers. We will continue to expand further into new verticals in 2016, pursuing our mission to revolutionize content and commerce across all online media categories.
