Duncan Riley> With the sale of Weblogs Inc., to AOL and Weblogs.com to Verisign, the question arises: what are blogs worth in dollar terms, both in direct sales (where possible) and also the advertising market.
I’ll be exploring some statistics in the coming week which I intend on modelling off the Weblogs Inc., sale, but I’ll take a shot at it: I’m willing to suggest that blogging companies (including companies such as SixApart) and blogs themselves have a culmative value of over $1 billion USD, and probably a fair bit more. After years of trying to be taken seriously we’ve woken up to a new world where blogs and blogging firms have real value, and that value is worth an awful lot of money. Consider that Myspace, although not strictly a blogging only play went for a couple of hundred million if you’re not convinced.
And the advertising side? we all know that this is growing rapidly. When I consider that one of my fellow countryman is sitting in his office on the other side of Australia earning staggering amounts of money from advertising, and when a guy by the name of Manalo who writes in the third person about shoes and brings in a 6 figure income it tells me that there is an awful lot of advertising money floating around blogs. Is it a billion dollar advertising market yet? I’m guessing no at this stage, but I’ll guess a figure: $500 million USD and rapidly growing. I’d suggest that within six months blog advertising (including programs such as Adsense) is going to be a billion dollar industry.
We live in interesting times.
