This list of the supposed 25 most valuable blogs aint worth a dime.
1. I know the actual numbers for a few of these properties, they are very different.
2. The list is note even close to complete - where are Treehugger, Popsugar etc. etc.
3. Alexa rank is largely irrelevant for these sites.
4. The multiple of CPM naively assumes all ad inventory is sold, this is never the case.
5. A five minute search will get you traffic numbers that are wildly different (remember the traffic numbers don't tend to be secret because thats what publishers have to reveal to get advertisers). Drudge report under 10M page views per month? Absolutely clueless. This is out by a colossal factor of 50! Gawker actually publishes the live traffic stats through a third party and these are tracked in the same way as Quantcast so of course they are the same.
6. The operating margins are out by 30 - 40% for the properties I know.
In short, this list is put together by someone who does not know what a blog is, what the top blogs are, how they sell ads or what it costs to run them. In terms of making an effort to find out what he does not know, he has traffic stats that are less than 2% accurate for some, when the actual figures are published on the web by multiple verifiable sources and searchable within 10 seconds. If this were a high school project, it would be embarrassing.
Nice to see that our sites at Curations would come in the top 15 and our operating margins are higher than any here - even if they are wildly out.
Widgets, like the name suggests, are little things, not fully fledged services - they are the shareware of web and may have eyeballs worth as little as PKZip (remember that): Zip! Caveat Investor: very few widgets should be companies.
What is the connection between Bebo, who were acquired for $850M today and Sharethis who have just raised a Series B of $15M from DFJ?
The connection is that Sharethis' page views, which justify such a high valuation for a widget, are worth less than the sub 50c CPM for social networks that is already spooking the ad driven online ecosystem.
Sharethis' series B will be based on the idea that they can fold in ads to the widget, rather like Feedburner did with RSS. But the ad opportunity, the value ad, and the switching cost are not the same as Feedburner, and the reach is nothing like the ginormous number that might have critical value.
This is a bubble that will collapse soon. Why? Because if you believe the hype, then the little pagecounter widgets you put at the bottom of a page are worth more than the page, Sitemeter would be worth a billion.
Sitemeter is not worth the same as Bebo. A widget on a page is worth less than the page itself and people can switch widgets.
Everyone goes on about how great it is with kids, to live in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Its a district that is awash with strollers and of-the-moment wine bars, and people making an effort to say why its better than living in a shoe box in Manhattan. Which if it has to be said, raises suspicion, since almost anything is better than living in a shoe box.
But the amazing thing is that the primary thing people think about with urban kids is schools. People fight to get their kids into the schools in Park Slope, which is gobstoppingly amazing, considering what they look like.
This is the local elementary school - which looks like a Northern Irish. prison, before the ceasefire, with a sarcastic multi colored sign by Banksy.
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