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October 08, 2005
Calacanis, AOL and 25 Million Smackers
Blogville's a twitter over Jason Calacanis' recent sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL for an estimated $25 million. In an unrelated but still lucrative deal, Dave Winer sold Weblogs.com to Verisign for $2.3 million. (Scroll down.) Congrats, Dave.
Here in Stockholm, it's a quiet autumn Saturday with birdsong in the air, crunchy leaves underfoot and virtually no pulse-revving blog or RSS announcements in the offing. As a public service I'll tear myself away from the lovely surroundings to provide a few snippets of punditry related to this greatly hyped purchase.
From rival Nick Denton:
"The acquisition of WIN by AOL is exhilirating news, in many respects, most of which I shouldn't list here. For what it's worth, Gawker isn't for sale. The whole point about blogs is that they're not part of big media. Consolidation defeats the purpose. It's way too early. Like a decade too early."
From potty mouth Mike Butcher:
"Big media is going to get into blogs, there's no doubt. Look at Murdoch and MySpace. The mistake they will make is forcing their staff to start linking to internal brands, pissing in the pool and potentially turning readers off." I hate when that happens, don't you? "AOL executives normally produce more than $25m just going to the toilet. The bubble isn't over. However, I think it won't go much farther. If you actually look at some of the blogs on Weblogs Inc, they are just ghost towns - filled with 'Here's the best of the WEN network' posts. AOL must know this, surely?"
Calacanis himself on what's next:
"AOL loves the fact that I’m 'out there' blogging and debating the issues in our industry." Sure it does--to a point. "However, let me be clear and say I’m not becoming the Robert Scoble of AOL (at least not at this point). I’m not going to be talking about things outside of Weblogs, Inc. all that much because, frankly, I’m not involved in them! I can’t tell you what’s going on with Netscape, Moviephone, AIM, etc. I can forward you to an AOL PR executive who will be glad to speak with you...."
Thanks but no thanks, Jason. I think we can find one on our own.
From Dana Blankenhorn on Corante:
"AOL is said to be giving Calacanis autonomy, plus a five year contract, the question occurs how much autonomy will he get, and what kind of budget? After Blogger was bought by Google similar promises were made, but Blogger has yet to fulfill its technical or financial potential, and Six Apart (which remains independent) still hosts more blogs than any other platform. ... If this business is so good why is it worth so little?"
Because it's not that good, at least not yet. But we may get there. As Forbes explains:
"The next Steven Spielberg could be your neighbor down the street. The next Madonna could be in the cube across the aisle." And I could be the next Mike Tyson and pop the writer in a hurry if this story doesn't get to the point soon. "...Media conglomerates are now betting they can get compelling content on the cheap, either by enlisting the ranks of nonprofessionals or by asking customers themselves to make their own media."
Why not? The reality-TV craze has put professional actors out of work. As an industry executive told the Washington Post last year, "Reality works because it is relatively cheap to make.... Prime-time reality is a nice little business -- if it is nonunion." The pay for top media execs is pretty sweet (scroll down), while the rates for freelance writers, at least, have declined 50 percent since the 1960s. That's pretty damn cheap. But maybe not cheap enough for the corporate crowd. We'll see.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at October 8, 2005 03:31 PM