When 85 Equals 31
October 6, 2005 by Mary Jo Manzanares
Filed under Business
My friend Scott Kidder has posted an analysis of WIN which points out a fact that I was well aware of a long time ago. WIN’s claim to having 85 blogs (or whatever number they were screaming out) is a complete fallacy. Many of those blogs sit dormant and others just have “Best of WIN” type entries. So basically AOL paid $25M for 31 blogs…
God bless corporate America.
Hell when you look at things from this perspective the Instablogs launch doesn’t seem that bad. All this time at 9rules we were waiting for the day we would reach the same number of blogs as WIN only now to realize we surpassed them a long time ago. Funny, does this make us the largest blog network in the world?.
I don’t know. I’m always weary of a major corporate “launch” rivaling something that’s a grassroots effort. It’s kind of like the disaster that is the music industry’s answer to file sharing.
That’s one of the dangers, I think, of having too many damn blogs to oversee.
How many of those 31 are decent? I only know of Engadget really and I typically use Gizmodo instead.
I’m no fan of AOL, but they are a pretty big company with (I’m assuming) a decent sized research department. It seems to me that, before spending millions of dollars on a sure-to-be publicized acquisition, they would have _at least_ browsed every blog under WIN. So, since there seems to be a relative consensus that many of the blogs under WIN aren’t even that amazing, it may be that AOL’s purchase has little to do with the blogs. Perhaps it was a PR move (I doubt it. $25 million could be spent better for PR than buying WIN) or maybe they just wanted to own the ideas, resources, and people that WIN contains. Regardless, AOL’s purchase can hardly be criticized on the level that the blogs they bought are lacking in number and quality, since AOL probably didn’t buy WIN for that reason.
I was completely amazed by the fact that a set of
So 9rules counts as a network now?
I think the name made it count like a Network a long time ago, although Duncan’s definition takes it out of the equation.
Something weird happened to my comment I think. It was ehm… longer than what’s visible now! ;)