All the hype about the sale of Weblogs Inc. to America Online (AOL) has given rise to the now famous question – How much is your blog worth? In acquiring Weblogs Inc., AOL has provided some concrete metrics to future valuation of blogs. How much will traditional media be willing to pay for a blog? Conversely, how much would you sell your blog for?

AOL-Weblogs Inc. Deal – Benchmark for Future Blog Valuation

Weblogs Inc was established by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey in 2003. It is a network of blogs which includes under its wings successful blogs such as Engadget and Autoblog. Jason Calacanis pointed out that Weblogs Inc. earns in excess of $1 million yearly in Google Adsense revenues alone.

AOL purchased Weblogs Inc. for a confidential sum assessed at somewhere between $25 – $40 million. After said purchase, Tristan Louis came up with a blog valuation scheme based on the deal. He created a chart of blog value using the value of each inbound link to Weblogs Inc. as the basis. It is common knowledge that blog readers follow links. Search engines also act as users and primarily determine blog quality rankings based on linkage data thus direct and indirect value links are a great proxy for value measurement. In the blogosphere, conversations that nurture connectivity represented by links and indexes like Technorati give a vantage view of the value of a blog.

Tristan Louis itemized the publicly available data (list of blogs indexed) at Weblogs Inc. network including the number of inbound links (Technorati blog numbers) per blog divided by the purchase price to determine the value of an inbound link to a blog. At the rumored price of $25 million, the estimated value is $ 564 per link. At $30 million, it is $677.57 per link and $903.42 at an acquisition price of $40 million. Interestingly, the consumer segment chalks up the biggest percentage of linkage. Engadget represents over a third of the overall network traffic.

Applying Tristan Louis’s Weblogs Inc, sale, Dave Winer has also sold http://Weblogs.com to Verisign for a rumored price of around $2 million. Blog entrepreneur Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media has signed a deal with VNU Media to publish Gizmodo (gadget blog) across Europe in six languages. VNU Media is a leading worldwide information and media company which owns ACNielsen, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, among others. With this deal, blog publishing has hit big time.

However, the value of a blog is not calculated based solely on links using AOL’s purchase of Weblogs Inc. Jason Calacanis, the man behind Weblogs Inc., disputed using links alone as proxy for the value of the blog network. He reiterated that the acquisition price was based also on the ever reliable revenue, earnings, management and other metrics.

Tristan Louis based his valuation scheme on links to a blog but he also acknowledged the significance of technology, talented management team, financial performance and growth. There is direct correlation between links, traffic, revenue and earnings capacity of a blog or blog network but it takes sound management to maximize all these potentials.

Value of a Blog – Some Metrics to Consider

How much is your blog worth? There is no one standard gauge yet. But one way to measure the value is to look at certain factors to gain a better perspective on how to measure the future value of a blog.

Aside from number of links as mentioned earlier, traffic level is a key factor in determining blog value. Highly trafficked blogs definitely have a bigger potential for earning compared with those blogs with few readership. A blog’s success is highly dependent on visitors/readers. However, ascertaining the value of traffic is a thorny issue. Some bloggers value traffic anywhere from $3 to $10 per hit a day. From this data, a blog with 2000 unique visitors (page views) would be worth between $6000 to $20,000. The downside to this valuation approach is that some traffic is more valuable than others. A personal blog might have 1000 unique visitors but more difficult to convert to revenue than a blog with 1000 readers that blogs on the topic of digital cameras.

Aside from diverse traffic streams that come from bookmarks, direct links or RSS subscribers will make risk of losing traffic low. Social bookmarking sites are inching their way to becoming prime sources of traffic, with peer referral at times carrying more weight than search results. There are a number of well known bookmarking sites you should link to. Top bookmarking sites include Furl, http://del.icio.us, Diggs, to name a few. By leaving an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, you can feed you readers’ desire for information. Visitors can get automatic updates whenever you provide new content. Having a fairly good base of bookmarkers and subscribers ensure a steady flow of fans and repeat readers – the all-important traffic.

In the blogosphere as in any other field, revenue or earnings is a major focus. a logical approach to blog valuation would be to base its worth upon current and projected earnings, assuming that your blog is earning something to start with. Again, there are varying views on how to use current earnings to measure a blog’s value.

Some bloggers opine you should expect six to eight months earnings as your blog value. A blog with a daily income of $150 would be worth between $27,000 – $36,000. Still, others determine a blog’s value as being two years of current earnings. A blog earning $150 a day would be worth $108,000. Again, there is a huge disparity between these methods of assessing value. Having diverse streams in the form of multiple affiliate programs also increases blog revenue. An affiliate program is an advertising model in which a blog owner markets via his blog a given product, on behalf of another company. The blog owner is reimbursed a percentage of all sales sold thru his affiliate link. Reimbursement rates can vary from 1% and upwards. Google Adsense is a prime example.

Visitors access blogs throughout the Internet primarily through search engines. If your blog does not have a post appearing in the top ten search engine rankings, the chances of visitors reaching your blog is low. A blog’s presence on relevant search engines is a significant medium for maintaining a blog’s success. Search engine ranking and pages indexed in search engines is critical for generating traffic to a blog. Having your blog among the top results of a search or receiving a high Google PageRank (a system for ranking blog posts) would increase your blog’s overall value.

High quality content will always be a key factor for determining a blog’s value. As has been said time and time again – Content is King. Moreover, search engines can only “read” a blog. What attracts a search engine are the words, the content of a blog that explains, informs, shares and educates readers. Good content increases blog value.

All these aforementioned objective metrics can be considered in assessing the value of a blog. Added to all these, a talented management team behind a blog, its underlying tools and blog technology in use can further help to estimate the future value of a blog.

• ISBN13: 9780300152654
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description

One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy

The phenomenal growth of pay-per-click advertisement amid uncertainties

Today pay-per-click advertising, by and large, is assumed to be one of the quickest and effective ways of promoting one’s business online. To many it is still an effective medium to get listed in the top of the search engines without having to undertake strenuous preparatory works for search engine optimization.

But the beginning was not the same as it is now. Rather this concept encountered bleeding teething problems in its progressive strides. The idea was not well-received; some critics even went to the extent of prophesying that it is definitely headed for a doom.

People questioned the rationale of paying any penny for getting web site in prominent positions where the search is exclusively keyword driven. They justified their proposition by saying that as against the banner ad, pay-per-click is relatively minor advertising stunt, and that too is not there all the time.

As of now, situations have taken a positive turn. The success saga of pay-per-click advertising is known to one and all. Now advertisers promptly bid on keywords, promising to pay certain amount of money every time someone clicks on their ad, which pops up when a search exercise is performed by any surfer.

Pay-per-click advertisement is in eye of the storm

Pay-per-click advertisement has grown over the years, but it has also become susceptible to what is referred to as “Click Fraud.” There are an increasing number of people, who have mastered the art of tampering with pay-per-click advertisement, and have posed a real threat to the prospects of pay-per-click advertisement for online advertisers and the companies offering them.

Click fraud comes into picture when a user — accidentally or deliberately — or a competitor with malafide intention, clicks on a business’ ad and subsequently disappears into the thin air. No actual use of the advertisement — mere clicking through. Such instances tend to inflate the earmarked advertising budget of the company which has chosen this medium for online sales and marketing. On the other side of the fence, it adds to earning potential of an affiliate web site which hosts pay-per-click advertisement campaign on behalf of select companies opting for this genre online advertising.Statistics from the industry reveal that click frauds account for as high as 20 per cent for certain keywords. Further, estimate suggests that one out every five dollars spend on pay-per-click advertisement goes down the drain.

What led to the present messy situations?

Definitely the present state of pay-per-click advertisements has given its doom pundits a reason to rejoice, and they may be basking in their proud moments. Many companies have turned to the advantages of such kind of web promotion, while small and mid-sized firms have realized that pay-per-click- advertisement is particularly beneficial for them because they don’t have to put in much investment.

This was until click fraud did not begin to spread its ugly wings. Now it is a roller-coaster ride for companies, and they are wishing to have some way for plugging in the loopholes existing in the system.

Let’s understand the reasons for such messy state of affairs.

The “gold rush” can be blamed on more than one count. This fact is deplorable that it is excessively easy to publish pay-per-click advertising links from Google and Yahoo. What suffices for the purpose is joining Google AdSense or corresponding Yahoo program. Your business gets a fillip, and you do not have to spare even a penny.

It is highly inexpensive to purchase a domain name, and this is another major reason for the predicament pay-per-click advertisement is faced with. VeriSign, which runs the .com and .net domain names, offers domain names for as little as $6 to $7 per year. Hence, a web site hosting pay-per-click ads doesn’t’t need to get many people clicking through its ads in order to turn a profit. To make it worse, there is five-day “Add Grace Period,” during which new registrations can be deleted for a full refund.

Is the time ripe for switching over to other online advertising model, if any?

Bill Gross was the force behind GoTo.com’s “pay-per-click” advertising model which heralded an era of pop-ups advertisement. GoTo.com was subsequently purchased by Yahoo in 2003, and later on Google also adopted a similar online advertising medium called AdWords. But click fraud inflicted them all.

Bill Gross’ new advertising model called cost-per-action holds answer to challenge posed by click fraud. The model aptly called cost-per-action is based on the premise that companies do not have to pay every time a user clicks on an ad and enter their web sites. Payment becomes obligatory only when clicking through an ad leads to a desired action, for instance, a purchase, filling out a firm, downloading some stuff and so forth. The bottom line in this model is that this is mutually beneficial this time around on an equitable basis.

This model is inherently and fundamentally strong not to give click fraud a chance. Click fraud occurs when someone visits an advertiser’s web site with malicious intention for securing pecuniary advantage or harming the interest of other partner. Since the advertiser is no longer under obligation to pay for damn mindless clicks, click fraud can’t happen.

Snap.com is leading from the front

This online advertising model, better described as “a next-generation search engine for broadband users.” was characteristic feature of Snap.com, which launched it for the first time. Snap.com has some other enabling technology going for it. It joins algorithmic search results together with human click stream data, and calls it “behavioral ranking.” The cardinal principle here is that sites which give people more value will rank higher than others who do not. Snap.com holds the reason that values are measurable in terms of quality of content and number of transactions completed. The higher the qualities of content, the longer surfers are likely to be engrossed is what Snap.com believes in.

Cost-per-action model seems to be all set to grow manifold. Sooner than the later, it will influence other search engines to adopt their own versions of its model and become more customer-centric. The possibility is not far off that this time around Bill Gross’s innovative approach is deservedly purchased by Google.

On September 22, 2009 Rhys Davies will be launching Mafioso Marketing 2. This is a follow-up to the successful Mafioso Marketing in which teaches the methods that he used to earn $148,000 at only 17 years old. It features a simple 3 step system for building wealth. The MIF Formula lets you pick and choose between methods for monthly, instant and future profits.

This site will be updated with the latest information on Mafioso Marketing as we get closer to the launch day. Be sure to check back as I outline an exclusive Marketing Mafioso 2 Bonus!