Blog Value, or Blog Worth,(My blog is worth $318,965.10 as of today. according to the widget on How Much Is Your Blog Worth? page) has been more of an issue lately as blogs are beginning to be treated more like traditional media; a post in Conversation Agent titled Are Blogs Becoming More Like Old Media? earlier this week:
"...I think that the editors of online publications in most cases started as bloggers and then applied what they learned through the interactive and first person experience to publishing the news in a format that readers (we) have come to expect. "
Others define Blog Value in Stock Market terms like Value Blog Review that talks about other blogs like Microcap Speculator , Stock Market Prognosticator and Naked Capitalism; that's not the kind of Blog Value or Blog Worth I'm talking about.
Meanwhile, Blog Worth, or Blog Value as determined by Pingoat.com didn't work ('m assuming whoever runs Pingoat hasn't kept the site updated - the tool used Technorati API, and the Duck Soup library created by Kailash Nadh; too bad, I'm wondering if the numbers would have come up the same or not.
Also, Jeremy Zawodny used BlogShares, back in 2003, to figure out that his blog was then worth 624 dollars; according to the How Much Is Your Blog Worth? page Jeremy Zawodny's blog is worth $1,372,396.74 today.
But what does it all mean? In Bloggers Blog post How Much Are The Top Blogs Worth?
"...there's no question the major media companies will start looking to acquire the big blogs. Technically, they already have started. TreeHugger, which ranks 17th on the Technorati 100, recently sold for an estimated $10 million so the higher ranked and higher trafficked Huffington Post and TechCrunch sites should be able to sell for over $10 million. Some traffic may be lost if there is no talent movement as part of the deal. If the blog's founder(s) do not continue to blog following a sale people might lose interest in the blog. There is also the risk that a blog may not be as interesting once it is no longer independent. But popular blogs have constant traffic, large numbers of feed subscribers, tens of thousands of inbound links and large archives of content. At some point it will be easier for the big media companies to just buy the wheel rather than try to reinvent it. "
I bet that is what some blog networks are hoping will happen, including mine. In fact, for my blog, which is, and my sitemeter and feedburner stats prove, the most popular Know More Media blog in their network.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if I stopped authoring webmetricsguru.com and another author took over.
Probably, I think, webmetricsguru would gradually rot away, were I to stop authoring it - because the value of a Brand, in the case of a blog like mine, a blog I created and started through Know More Media, is associated with the value and insights of the main blogger for it, not the network it's part of.
Some blogs are topical, anyone can author them in that field or subject area, and it can work if enough people are interested in the subject and the blog is well optimized. Other blogs, like TechCrunch, would greatly diminished, if Michael Arrington were to leave it - that's got to be part of the equation.
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