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Has blogging become a multi-billion dollar industry?

Has blogging become a multi-billion dollar industry?

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.

View Comments (5)
  • Beware the bubble though. If the WIN blogs went for $350,000 each, and ad revenue from AdSense is $1m a year over more than 80 blogs in the network, that could be over-priced.

  • Julia Angwin wrote a related article that appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal on Sep 28, entitled, “Media Firms Dig Into War Chests For Latest Assault on the Internet”. I blogged it on In Your Web.

    Nonetheless, it talked about the big media companies, specifically naming Viacom, Disney, News Corp, and you guessed it, AOL Time Warner, are actively looking to acquire high-profile Internet properties frequented by younger audiences. Their goal is to get themselves established in the online media publishing industry.

    These companies have traditionally relied on other mass-market channels, such as television, radio, newspaper, magazines. But many of these channels are seeing their market share erode. Newspapers are losing subscriptions, namely due to online news channels. Hence, these companies have launched initiatives to invest heavily into online media markets.

    So, when you try to assess the overall value of the blog industry, don’t just count the actual dollars that bloggers are earning. But consider that right now, the overall value has been inflated due to a sense of panic from the major media companies. Perhaps, the value has increased even more, now that AOL Time Warner made the first move.

  • I think they will slow down, once google and others figure out how to stop spam.Because lot of google adsense blogs are stoped already.they’ll figure out how to slow this down, I think it’s lot of fairytales about those blogs.

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