More Deal details

A guy does the numbers on the AOL-WeblogsInc. deal. Plus Steve Rubels del.icio.us links.

AOL acquires WeblogsInc.

Darnet. I wish Jason Calacanis' company - according to him the largest blog publisher in the world - would have stayed under the radar a little bit longer. But now Jeannie is out of the bottle and another "hot" internet company went corporate. For the better or for the worse - we'll see. The great news site Paidcontent had the scoop. Founder Rafat Ali (who I interview for the Swiss business weekly Cash) writes:

Among the other companies Weblogs Inc talked to included the usual suspects: News Corp, Yahoo and MSN...
This is a very quick exit: the company was founded about two years ago, and took some money from Mark Cuban a year down the line. For Calacanis, this is his second company being sold in a space of about two years...his original company Rising Tide Studios was first sold to Wicks Business Information, which in itself was bought out by Dow Jones.
The company's blogs have had an exponential trajectory, with sites like Engadget, Autoblog, BloggingBaby, and others. In total, the company has about 130 bloggers, with about 15 full time employees, from what I know.
AOL intends to keep the company/blogs separate from its site, much in the vein of what is happening with other blog and Web 2.0 companies being bought. But this is perhaps the first pure content-related company being bought out in the blog/ Web 2.0 space...or at least of this scale.
For AOL, this is head first into the blog media revolution, so to speak. Calacanis, who was at the We Media conference today where I was, refused comment; I did spot him with an AOL tote bag.
Staci adds: How much will Weblogs Inc. cost AOL? One estimate I heard today was roughly $20 million as an earn-out -- to get it all, Weblogs Inc. would have to meet certain goals. But I've also heard talk of Flickr-like numbers, which would make it closer to $30-35 million range. Certainly to Weblogs' execs advantage to have people thinking towards the higher end. Weblogs Inc. revenues are running at $1 million-plus annually from Google AdSense alone, according to numbers jubilantly released by Calacanis on his own blog; during a panel last week he said the company was bringing in $2 million a year. With that in mind, either of those numbers would be a generous multiple.

More about this story:
Technorati.
Memeorandum.
Reuters.

Consumer tune into blogs

From Frank Barnako's Internet Daily:
Technology is making it easier to ignore mainstream media advertising. Instead, consumers are using Web logs, mobile messaging, comparison shopping Web sites, and word-of-mouth to make buying decisions, according to Forrester Research Inc. Date released Tuesday by the firm reported 10% of consumers read blogs at least once a week, compared with 5% a year ago. Really Simple Syndication feeds (RSS) are used by 6%, compared to 2% in 2004.
"Technology has given consumers an option to tune businesses out, and tune each other in," said Chris Charron, a Forrester (FORR) vice president, in a statement. "On the flip side, technology has given businesses an opportunity to gain greater customer insights at a lower cost," by monitoring blogs and Web sites and message boards "to uncover consumer insight and accelerate the innovation of products, services, and design," he said.