I think the best commentary was this:
You know who won the Super Bowl? Arianna Huffington.
AOL bought HuffPo for $315 million last night. Based on the claims in their press release, they have about 25 million unique visitors a month. Let’s consider just how much that really is. Scaling down based on traffic, AOL could pay well over $600K for this blog. When I did the math and shared that news with Sebastian, he said he would sell. For anything over half a million, I guess we could be blog neighbors with Paul Helmke.
You have to adjust the value for how much ad viewers will follow the herd and do what they’re told. That’s a lot higher for HuffPo than this blog.
I’d be ok with AOL ads on this blog (actually, any ads without band-with sucking flash video would be fine).
If signing up with AOL were a requirement to read this blog, I’d have to bail.
You probably get more traffic than Helmke’s blog.
Hopefully when AOL finally goes the way of the DoDo so will HuffPo…..
Without getting into the herd thesis I think it’s obvious that they’re also buying a community. I strongly suspect that the value of communities can increase in a non-linear fashion with their size due to network effects, e.g. see Metcalfe’s law.
You couldn’t have asked for a better match. An original technology company who’s user’s email address has long been synonymous for idiot, buying a company who’s…, well, you figure it out…
They can have my blog for $1,500 or I’ll trade for an M1A.