AOL to Acquire Weblogs, Inc.

Posted on October 6, 2005

Reuters has a news story about AOL's plans to buy Weblogs, Inc., a blog network with over 80 blogs. Reuters says that the deal was for $25 million but the actual purchase figure could be more or less. The story was originally broken by Paid Content who said:

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.

Paid Content also says that AOL's plans are to keep the Weblogs, Inc. blogs seperate from AOL but Jeff Jarvis points out that "AOL has a history of buying things and killing them."

A Paid Content follow-up to their original story says the news about the Weblogs, Inc. and AOL deal has spread like wildfire around the blogosphere and that there is possible news of yet another big blog deal.

This story has spread like wildfire across the blogosphere...check Technorati here and Tech Memeorandum here...it might be announced tomorrow AM now, we've learned. Also, Reuters has picked up the story, here. Scoble says he knows of another big blog-related deal about to be announced...