How Calacanis Does It
By now it’s oldish news that blog creator and aggregator Weblogs Inc., run by the irrepressible Jason Calacanis, is being bought by AOL, after flirtations with a lot of the other big players.
How did Calacanis’s network, home to leading tech-blog Engadget, and other blog powerhouses, get so big so fast, so he’s able to cash out only two years after creating it? One way is through careful and constant use, care and feeding of Google’s Ad Sense ads to maximize revenue. So good, in fact, that Google has done a case study to talk about how Calacanis did it. (Here’s a short piece on the study.) Another way, according to this piece, is by “gaming” blog-rating service Technorati by having all the blogs link and cross-link. Look in the lower right column of any of the Weblogs Inc. blogs, like Engadget, to see the list. But if that’s a crime, there are a LOT of guilty people, from pornographers to B2B sites and major media. (Perhaps it’s more incumbent on the folks writing the blog-crawling algorithms to correct for that, as search engines have corrected as best they can for “keyword packing.” It’s a constant challenge. But can we blame Weblogs for pointing us to its other properties?)
And, when I met Calacanis at the “We Media” conference a couple weeks ago, he told me the secret to his success, and how he’s managed in some instances to leapfrog rival Gawker Media run by Nick Denton: hire good bloggers and keep them. If they do well, and traffic is going up, keep giving them more money, so they’ll stay with Weblogs. Meaning, get good people, and treat them well. Comforting to hear a publisher say the way to gain audience that leads to financial success is by finding and rewarding talented journalists.
While we’re on the topic of blog networks: By way, Glam.com, a fashion blog network pointed out to me by TopButton.com, which I do work for, is being hailed as a sign that the VC money is back for real: Many are calling it the first “vertical” aggregation — a group of properties on a single topic area (fashion) — with serious money behind it since the go-go days.