More on Blog Valuations and Acquisitions
Felix Salmon at Portfolio.com has further thoughts on the BreakingViews piece that I posted on yesterday.
Felix takes a less ..umm.. nuanced approach than I did, though we come to the same conclusion. He opens his post with:
Breakingviews, one of the least web-savvy websites in the world, ran a column by Jeff Segal on Monday about blog valuations.
Ouch.
But, the post deserved such treatment. Felix references some of the same obvious examples that I had referenced, such as Jason Calacanis' sale of Weblogs, Inc. to AOL to refute the basic premise that blogs aren't viable M&A candidates for media companies. It's hard to imagine that the BreakingViews writer was unaware of those deals.
A key point in Felix' post is the fact that unlike the zero sum game of traditional media properties, in blogs, intelligent competition can lift all boats:
I want other finance blogs to launch, the more the better. And I want them to be written by keener minds than mine. The more that happens, the more traffic I'll get - that's the way the conversation works. Other media don't work like that: if I'm watching ABC, I'm not watching NBC. But blogs are different, and don't operate according to that kind of zero-sum mathematics.
Looking at properties like TechCrunch, PaidContent and even Alacra's own Research Recap, it's pretty evident that the blogging platform is a great platform to launch media properties. And once those properties develop an audience they are just as attractive (probably more attractive when you figure in cost structure) than the traditional forms of media.
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