Tag Archive for 'aol'

Dot blog bubble

With all the mergers and acquisitions going on at the minute, it is only natural to wonder what the value of your site/blog is. I see Tom Murphy recently mentioned that Boards.ie was offered $750,000 for the site back in the original dot.com bubble but they turned it down. I wonder what it would be worth now that we are in the dot blog bubble.

Well, part of that speculation has been made easier for us by Tristan Louis - he analysed the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal in great detail and came up with a valuation of $564.64 per inward link for a blog. I’m not sure if there is an easy way to tell how many inward links boards.ie has. Google reports 2910 - but that doesn’t account for the deeper links to the various fora and discussions. Still - even this conservative figure values Boards.ie at over $1.6m - nice one guys.

In my own case, Technorati reports 466 links into this site (from 118 sites). So that puts a value of $263,122 on this site! I tell you what, I’ll let it go for an even $250,000 ;-)

In all seriousness, influential blogger or not, there is no way that this site is worth that much. Valuations like that do nobody any favours (except perhaps Jason Calacanis). We are back in the dot com bubble days all over again. The bubble is going to burst with all the financial losses and pain that brings. Again. And technology is going to get an even worse name than it has had for the last 3-4 years.

How do we avert this second spectacular fall from grace? I have no idea - anyone who has any suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

UPDATE:
I see Kevin Burton is thinking along the same lines.

Blog for sale - apply within!

I see on Dave Winer’s blog that he has confirmed the rumour that he sold Weblogs.com to Versign - he neglected to say how much for! The rumour mill is putting a figure of ~$5m on it.

Couple that with the news that AOL are buying Weblobsinc.com for somewhere between $25-$40m, and the news of Nick Denton of Gawker Media’s deal with VNU and I’m starting to think, hey maybe there’s money in them thar blogs after all!

It feels like early 2000 all over again, or on the other hand, as BL says

for a couple million, I’d sell this blog. Serious inquiries only.

Weblogs Inc to be bought by AOL

I see PaidContent.org and Reuters are reporting that AOL are about to buy Weblogs Inc. network for $25m!

Weblogs Inc was set up by Jason Calacanis two years ago as a network of blogs and includes under its umbrella titles such as Engadget and Autoblog. According to Calacanis, Weblogs Inc earns in excess of $1m annually in Google Adsense revenues.

Congrats to Jason, $25m for two years work is, by any standards, a good return!




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