AOL to buy Weblogs Inc.
Yesterday AOL Time Warner announced they were buying Weblogs, inc. We’ve written about Weblogs, inc previously in our article Blogging for Profit. The deal is rumored to be worth between 20 and 25 million dollars.
Weblogs, Inc. ran a series of approximately 85 blogs and had over 100 paid authors on staff. From other blogs I’ve read previously authors were paid beginning at a rate of $500 a month. They had a minimum number of posts to make in order to earn that income. As a blogger got more popular the rates would improve.
From statistics I’ve seen Weblogs, Inc. made over $2000 a day in adsense revenue and they also had additional paid advertising from banner advertisers and sponsors.
This is a pretty big deal for blogging because I think it is the first really large sale of a blog network.
We were already seeing a bunch of similar blog networks popping up from people trying to follow the bandwagon. I expect we’ll see a lot more blog networks popping up hoping to cash in on blogging. We’ll probably also see some other big media networks buying up blog networks to keep up with AOL Time Warner.
For the bloggers themselves, I wonder what they get out of the deal. Did they get any money or stock options in the deal? If not, it could be a devstating blow to the blogger. What if AOL decides to weed out some of the less popular blogs? A lot of bloggers stand to loose their jobs as a result of it. At least one blogger I know the writer and actor Wil Wheaton had recently started writing about his poker playing on Weblogs, Card Squad site. Having just started blogging there a month or so ago, what will this mean for Wil? After moving all his poker writing to Card Squad is he now going to wish he could go back to just updating WWdN?
It will be interesting to watch the blog community for the next few months.
- Ben
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It seems like all the adsense revenue was distributed between the authors. Couldn’t the authors get this revenue anyway if they blogged on their own with no relation to Weblogs? This adds to the company a cash flow from the additional banners, advertisers and sponsors… Where is the 25M$ worth here? I’m sure there is more to this…
Hi eburcat,
Welcome to our site.
Yes I think you’re right. I think a lot of revenue came from adsense and went straight back to the authors. However I also think they received a lot of money in private sponsorships. At least in the first year of running the sites they received more money in private sponsorships than they did from Adsense.
If they received as much money in sponsorships as from Adsense they’d be on track to make something like $5 million, this year. Thats just a GUESS. I don’t know for sure. But even so that means AOL Time Warner paid 4-5x earnings.
Well, I guess you learn something new every day.
I knew that the Blogs were popular things to do, but I had no idea that they were so profitable as well. Perhaps I am in thw wrong busniss.
Nahhh…
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