Tumblr, the incredibly popular microblogging platform, is doing very well. The company announced that they now reach over 120 Million people every single month through their nearly 42 Million blogs and 16 Billion+ posts.

The site makes it very easy to post content or get a message out there. Users have built-in options to easily share an image, text, video, and so on. Add to the fact that you can use a bookmarklet to share anything interesting that you’ve came across, and you’ve got a winner.

While most people look at the blogging platform as a place for teens, it’s actually a lot more than that and has quite the adult audience. Also, many businesses and top brands use the platform to get content quickly out there.

Via VentureBeat:

“Tumblr’s quirky blogging platform and community network reaches 120 million people every month, founder and CEO David Karp disclosed at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich Monday. Karp, citing the startup’s latest Quantcast figures, shared that the social network and blogging hybrid now sees 15 billion page views each month.”

CEO David Karp on their growth:

“The early growth that we saw was around creators … our first community was those creators,” Karp said of Tumblr’s initial growth spurt. “We didn’t set out to build network .. all we wanted to do was make novel tools.” But in building explicitly for creators, a widespread network of creators, curators and content consumers was born.”

Do you have a Tumblr account and if so, how often do you use and post?

Tumblr Reaches 15 Billion Pageviews, 120 Million People Every Month is a post from: The Inquisitr

That awkward moment when you totally relate to a joke and everyone on Tumblr knows it.

Sex and Blogging is a post from: The Inquisitr

Watch out, Yelpers.

A blogger in Taiwan was dragged into court, initially sentenced to 30 days in prison and ultimately fined about $6,900 (US) for posting a critical restaurant review on her personal blog. The woman, identified by her last name only, complained of cockroach infestation, parking chaos and salty food, and the owner of the restaurant was displeased- and accused her of defamation:

After visiting a Taichung beef noodle restaurant in July 2008, where she had dried noodles and side dishes, Liu wrote that the restaurant served food that was too salty, the place was unsanitary because there were cockroaches and that the owner was a “bully” because he let customers park their cars haphazardly, leading to traffic jams.

The restaurant’s owner, surnamed Yang (楊), learned about Liu’s blog post from a regular customer, and filed charges against her, accusing her of defamation.

The Taichung District Court originally concluded that Liu’s review “exceeded reasonable bounds,” and handed down the 30 day sentence. Liu appealed, and was ordered to pay restitution of NT$200,000 for revenues lost due to her blog post. The court opined that characterizing the restaurant’s food as “salty” was unreasonable as Liu only sampled one dish, and a subsequent health inspection determined that conditions in the restaurant were not as unsanitary as the writer described.

Blogger Jailed, Fined For Critical Restaurant Review is a post from: The Inquisitr

A Staten Island woman has been stripped of her lifetime alimony payments of $850 a month after photos from her blog of the woman allegedly belly dancing at a swanky Manhattan venue were used in court by her ex-husband to contest a prior alimony judgement.

42-year-old Dorothy McGurk was awarded the marital home and the monthly payment after the court found originally that injuries from a 1997 car accident rendered the woman too physically fragile to work. But McGurk extensively blogged her belly-dancing activities, even presciently addressing the issue of her online activities coming back to haunt her. When a friend of Facebook asked after photos of an event, McGurk replied: “Gotta be careful what goes on line pookies. The ex would love to fry me with that…”

McGurk, who was ordered to pay more than $5,000 to her ex for lawyers fees in addition to the loss of the alimony, was chastised in court documents about her daily activities:

McGurk was also told to move out of the couple’s house, and her ex-husband was awarded 60% of its value because she “worked only two years of this 11-year marriage,” the judge wrote in her decision.

“The court credits husband’s testimony that wife slept all day or otherwise spent her day on the computer participating in Internet blogs,” the judge wrote.

McGurk claimed in court that the belly-dancing activities were recommended by a doctor, but on the stand, the doctor contradicted her testimony. Still, she denies ever engaging in the activities for which she was accused:

“I wish I could be a professional belly dancer, but it’s just not possible…The only thing I do are gentle exercises. One of them is undulating. What you do is suck in and flex the muscles of your belly,” she explained. She added that the photos on her blog show another woman dancing, though she refused to provide them to the News: “My girlfriend in front of me was belly-dancing with a sword, I was just standing behind her waving a veil.”

McGurk says she is appealing the decision pertaining to her ex-husband’s lawyer fees.

[NYP, Gothamist]

Blogging bellydancer loses alimony settlement over online postings is a post from: The Inquisitr

A year after announcing the that the more commonly used “website” could replace the stuffier “Web site” per their widely adopted guidelines, the Associated Press has now updated the AP Stylebook to allow “email” to replace the rather AOL-ish “e-mail” originally used.

AP style is a bit of a mild stressor for bloggers, because despite generally adopting a more casual tone than old media news sources, we like to adhere to some convention of propriety in tone overall. Consistency is also something most writers appreciate, and it’s a pain in the ass to know something like “e-mail” is officially correct when it looks so dated and passé. (When the AP issued a final edict on the “website” versus “Web site” issue last year, both Steven and I posted glowingly about the change.)

Reaction on the Twitters has been almost universally excited, with tweeters (in a totally non-ornithological context) re-tweeting the message above and thanking God. “Email” wasn’t the only streamlined term gifted to tech writers by the AP- “cellphone” and “smartphone” officially got their special dispensation to be real words, retiring the clumsier-yet-then-preferred “cell phone” and “smart phone.” “Calcutta” has also been updated to “Kolkata” (and I will admit at first I thought this could be a new social network of which I was not yet aware) but this particular change did not spark the same giddiness as the other terms.

Which tech terms would you like to see the AP add to their stable of updates? Have the style gods completely caught up with the latest set of changes?

Triumph for consistency: AP updates Stylebook to allow “email” unhyphenated is a post from: The Inquisitr

The bi-monthly reports on seemingly benign activities and dying early are in, and this time it’s not “sitting” that kills, and men are included in the at-risk group.

Blogger? Computer programmer? Administrative assistant? Hopefully getting old isn’t on your to do list, because if you spend more than four hours a day in front of a screen of any description (computer, television), then it seems you’re at an increased risk of early death, regardless of whether you exercise regularly. A study conducted by “international researchers” of 4,500 Scots found some mildly alarming stats:

…anyone who devotes more than four hours daily on screen-based entertainment such as TV, video games or surfing the web, ups their risk of heart attack and stroke by 113 percent and the risk of death by any cause by nearly 50 percent compared to those who spend less than two hours daily in screen play — and this is regardless of whether or not they also work out.

The risks associated with excessive sitting comprise a lengthy list, including impact on metabolic functions that predispose those affected to cardiovascular risk and conditions like Type 2 Diabetes. So what can you do to mitigate the risk? Sadly, researchers haven’t advised any proactive measures to protect against the circumstances, and the prognosis for future findings isn’t even that great. Emmanuel Stamatakis of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College in London comments:

“I would speculate that the list of sitting-specific health harms will be getting longer and longer in the years to come; this area of research is in its infancy,” Stamatakis says.

How many hours a day do you spend parked in front of a screen? Do these studies concern you?

Moderate computer use or TV time linked to early death is a post from: The Inquisitr

Picking a clever women’s magazine is kind of like selecting the classiest member of the cast of Jersey Shore.

Still, Marie Claire kind of hovered a bit above rags like Cosmo with some pieces on women’s issues around the world and a less trashy style focus. Like many former glossy readers (I consumed most of them voraciously in my college days at FIT) I can’t recall the last time I’ve flipped through the pages of one, but I seem to recall Marie Claire being slightly less focused on blowjobs, stilettos and lipgloss. In a time when magazines are desperately clinging to readers and trying to convert the techie ones to blog subscribers, the magazine with the motto “More Than a Pretty Face” has managed to fritter away a lot of that lingering esteem with one single, poorly written blog post by writer Maura Kelly.

Kelly, an admitted recovering anorexic, posted at length about her disgust at a new show that dares to depict fat people making out. She describes her horror at a new CBS sitcom about fatties, called Mike & Molly, in terms that have sparked widespread outrage in the blogosphere:

My initial response was: Hmm, being overweight is one thing — those people are downright obese! And while I think our country’s obsession with physical perfection is unhealthy, I also think it’s at least equally crazy, albeit in the other direction, to be implicitly promoting obesity! Yes, anorexia is sick, but at least some slim models are simply naturally skinny. No one who is as fat as Mike and Molly can be healthy. And obesity is costing our country far more in terms of all the related health problems we are paying for, by way of our insurance, than any other health problem, even cancer.

So anyway, yes, I think I’d be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other … because I’d be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything. To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room — just like I’d find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine addict slumping in a chair.

(Is a “heroine addict” someone who is dependent on romance novels?) Kelly goes on to insist she’s not a “size-ist jerk” despite the prior two paragraphs proving the opposite without a shadow of a doubt, even dusting off the “I have fat friends” argument. Then she lays down the icing on the fat-hating cake- the condescending advice to fat folks that may be tempted to walk across a room in her line of sight, people who clearly don’t know Kelly’s secret formula to being not repulsive:

(I’m happy to give you some nutrition and fitness suggestions if you need them — but long story short, eat more fresh and unprocessed foods, read labels and avoid foods with any kind of processed sweetener in them whether it’s cane sugar or high fructose corn syrup, increase the amount of fiber you’re getting, get some kind of exercise for 30 minutes at least five times a week, and do everything you can to stand up more — even while using your computer — and walk more. I admit that there’s plenty that makes slimming down tough, but YOU CAN DO IT! Trust me. It will take some time, but you’ll also feel so good, physically and emotionally. A nutritionist or personal trainer will help — and if you can’t afford one, visit your local YMCA for some advice.)

Kelly tacked on a majorly half-assed apology to offended fatties, but judging by the comments, it has done nothing to improve goodwill toward the magazine in the wake of the post’s publication. (Marie Claire is also currently a trending topic on Twitter.) Does Marie Claire need to re-evaluate its online editorial policies? Do you find this piece horribly offensive, or just sadly truthful? And is it just me, or is Kelly way too horsey-faced to complain about having to look at fat people in public?

‘Marie Claire’ loses ‘thinking women’s’ distinction with anti-fatty blog post is a post from: The Inquisitr

A New York City mommy blogger is being sued over $45,000 worth of dental work provided in exchange for a promise to write a “puff piece” about the dentist and dental offices.

According to documents filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, Lyss Stern of the Divalysscious Moms (yes, that’s really its name) parenting social network received the mind-boggling amount of dental services from the practice (the nature of the services was not revealed) but did not follow up with an article in December 2009, as agreed:

The suit filed in Manhattan Supreme Court says the article – about the practice’s “beginnings in the forefront of the cosmetic dental revolution” – never appeared.

And the $44,900 bill to the self-proclaimed “dentists to the stars” remains unpaid, the suit says.

“Elyssa Stern, as editor in chief of the New York Observer magazine, agreed to publish a four-page article in the December 2009 issue of the magazine profiling the achievements and advancements in the industry of [Lowenberg & Litcuchy],” the suit says.

Neither Stern nor a lawyer for the dental practice Lowenberg & Lituchy have commented to press about the lawsuit.

[NYDN via Gawker]

NYC ‘mommy blogger’ sued for not honoring dental barter is a post from: The Inquisitr

Old habits die hard with some people in the tech news game, and Weblogs Inc and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis is going back to his roots, with a new email newsletter.

The publication, titled Launch, aims to take on TechCrunch head on with serious tech startup news, and naturally comes with an associated conference/ event.

Calacanis told Jemima Kiss at The Guardian:

“If you get people to commit to an email relationship, it’s the deepest most intimate relationship you can have online. Much deeper than Facebook and certainly more intimate than a blog,” he says.

“I want high-quality insider information, a celebration of entrepreneurship and taking risk. I want it serious and insightful rather than salacious and link-baity.”

Calacanis started his tech reporting career editing and publishing Silicon Alley Reporter, an email newsletter that covered the first web boom in New York.

Jason Calacanis To Take On TechCrunch….With An Email Newsletter is a post from: The Inquisitr

If there is one thing that is a constant in the tech industry it is the secretive ways of Apple’s PR machine and the trigger finger of their legal department to go after anyone talking about Apple products before their time – especially bloggers. So this report out of Gawker’s Valleywag that Greg Kumparak, an editor at the recently purchased Techcrunch, was spotted taking a job offer packet from an Apple rep.

The details of the sighting as related by Valleywag’s Ryan Tate:

I’m at a restaurant/brewery called BJ’s in Cupertino, which is pretty much right outside Apple HQ’s front door. About one hour ago, three Apple employees came in. You can always tell because of the badges they wear on those extending cable things… What was weird was who joined them: Greg Kumparak, who writes for TechCrunch. Recognized him from his videos.

I could not hear what was going on, but about 10 minutes into the meal one of the Apple employees handed him a folder with an Apple logo on it. From what i’ve seen before, I’m almost certain this was an offer packet. They spent about 30 minutes talking about it. I could be wrong, but it really looked like Apple was trying to court him for a job.

According to Tate neither TechCrunchAOL nor Kumparak would comment on the report other than the normal wishy-washy type stuff about how everyone is valued and would be missed.

Personally I don’t know why Apple would think it needs to hire anyone when they get all the free adoration and fist-pumping from John Gruber and Kumparak’s colleague MG Siegler.

image courtesy of Valleywag.

RUMOR MILL: TechCrunchAOL editor mulling job offer from Apple is a post from: The Inquisitr

The end of days for some of the first great wave of blogging tools continues with news that Tucows intends on shutting old school third party blog roll service Blogrolling.

Founded in approx January 2002, Blogrolling offered hosted third party blogrolls, these days a fairly irregularly used feature on blogs which allowed blog owners to list and link to blogs of friends and blogs of similar topics in their sidebar. The service came at a time where blogrolls were not regularly offered as a standard feature in blog management systems.

Acquired by Tucows in February 2004, Blogrolling grew for some years, and offered services such as hot blogs lists based on the number of blogroll links offered among members. At acquisition the service was used on 1.5 million blogrolls.

The rise of WordPress, and hosted blogging platforms that offered blogrolls as a standard feature on blogs saw demand for the service fade, although some people have continued to use it over the years.

The exact date Blogrolling will be closed has not been announced, with Tucows only telling Darnell at The Blog Herald that an announcement will be made in the next week with the company hoping to give users time to export their links out of the system prior to final closure.

Blogrolling joins the recent announcement of the closure of Bloglines, and the acquisition of SixApart in the list of first generation blogging services and companies closing or disappearing as stand alone entities.

Tucows To Close Blogrolling is a post from: The Inquisitr

Shirley Sherrod, the USDA official fired for remarks she made that were deliberately misrepresented by Andrew Breitbart’s conservative blog BigGovernment.com, plans to sue for the incident.

Sherrod made her plans known this morning at a National Association of Black Journalists speech in San Diego. CBS News reports:

Speaking of a lawsuit, Sherrod said she “will definitely do it,” arguing that “he had to know that he was targeting me.”

“Now whether he was also trying to target the NAACP, he had to know he was targeting me,” she added.

Sherrod said she wished Breitbart had come to the event “because I really would like to talk to him.”

Sherrod also indicated that she is unsure whether she will opt to return to a position at the UDSA after her controversial dismissal. After the incident, President Obama said that Sherrod “deserved better” than the treatment she’d received. Breitbart later clarified on Good Morning America that Sherrod was not his intended target with the video, but that he had hoped to damage the NAACP by releasing the clip.

Shirley Sherrod plans to sue BigGovernment.com blogger Breitbart is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Associated Press, who have in the past taken a dim view toward quoting and linking to their content in the past, doesn’t seem to mind quoting from other people’s content, unsurprisingly enough.

In fact, the AP quoted from a post by Internet discount powerhouse Woot! when the retailer was acquired by Amazon last week. Woot! isn’t taking it lying down, though. The AP has suggested that bloggers pay for quoting just a few words, a move that largely bars new media from citing AP sources. The AP quoted a Woot! post in one of their articles, so Woot! said:

The AP, we can’t thank you enough for looking our way. You see, when we showed off our good news on Wednesday afternoon, we expected we’d get a little bit of attention. But when we found your little newsy thing you do, we couldn’t help but notice something important. And that something is this: you printed our web content in your article! The web content that came from our blog! Why, isn’t that the very thing you’ve previously told nu-media bloggers they’re not supposed to do?

Tsk, tsk, AP. And then Woot! suggested the AP follow their own standards, in a totally friendly way:

So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we’ve figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create. But, hey. We’re all friends here. And invoicing is such a hassle in today’s paperless society, are we right?

Woot! even gave the AP the option to purchase the two-pack of Sennheiser headphones for $7, which is a much better deal than just a few words- Woot! says:

You see, The AP, we think you’ll find the first pair of Sennheiser MX400 In-Ear Headphones lightweight and easy to carry, and we think you’ll like how they help you shut out the irritating sounds around you (such as, maybe, people yelling about the actual meaning of “fair use”).

Hee hee.

[Woot! via Consumerist]

Woot bills AP $17.50 for quoting their content is a post from: The Inquisitr

After the uproar last week following Perez Hilton tweeting a pic of Miley Cyrus in what may or may not have been a crotch revealing pose, the drama queeniest gossip blogger has done it again. Oops!

Perez explained on The View that he didn’t feel the image of a still 17-year-old Miley was illegal because he was not posting it for the sexual gratification of others. The internet wept in joy at his almost certain impending downfall, but the Cyruses decided not to press charges. Said Perez:

“I didn’t pick it for her to look like she wasn’t wearing underwear. The point of me choosing that one photo is because it was showing Miley getting out of the car in an unladylike fashion. And I just thought that was funny and in keeping with her shocking behavior of late, because she was very well aware that she was in a public place at a — at a video shoot and that there were paparazzi present.”

He also told the ladies of The View that he would happily tweet another picture of the pop-tart’s hoo-ha:

“I don’t regret what I did and I would do the same thing again … It’s not actually doing anything worse than Miley herself has been doing recently, from grinding up on her 40-something-year-old director to pole dancing to all the over-sexualized things that she has been doing and turning herself into this creature.”

And he did. So either he feels totally assured he’s not going to spend a stint in a PMITA prison, or he’s a total moron. The pic itself isn’t pornographic per se, but it would certainly give a blogger quaking in their pleather boots a second thought about jail. So Perez- really stupid, really really brave or does he have a really good lawyer? Perhaps a bit from each column?

Perez Hilton has lost his damn mind, tweets another racy Miley Cyrus pic is a post from: The Inquisitr

New media network Sugar Inc has entered the local guide market with the acquisition of the women focused FreshGuide Inc.

FreshGuide offers a city based guides covering four U.S. cities with a focus on products directed towards female consumers, including spas, restaurants, health & wellness and others.

FreshGuide Inc was founded in 2008 by PayPal veteran Ryan Donahue and launched BookFresh the same year, before launching the Freshguide.come site In January 2010.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, although we’re figuring it wasn’t a huge buy: although offering an interesting framework for expansion, Freshguide.com comes in at 171,161 on Alexa; page view figures are not available for the site. Notably Donahue is staying with the company, and mentions that with Sugar Inc on board FreshGuide will have strong support to expand out to 30 cities “in the U.S. and internationally in the UK, France, Germany and Australia where Sugar Inc. has operations.”

San Francisco based Sugar Inc is best known for its PopSugar network of blogs, and in recent years has grown to include the OnSugar hosted blogging platform and shopping site ShopStyle.

Sugar Inc Acquires FreshGuide is a post from: The Inquisitr

I first noticed this a month or so ago when I went to copy something from another blog to use as a quote. The copy went fine but when I pasted the section of text into the post that I was working there was suddenly a couple of blank lines and then this honkin’ huge assed link attached to what I had copied. The link had a nifty little message included telling the reader where the section of text had been copied from – like I was stealing it or something.

Look you idiots using this piece of crap service not only are you irritating the hell out of me by doing this (thereby making it less likely I will use you as a reference) but you are insinuating that I’m not intelligent enough to give proper attribution for your words.

Here’s a hint. Stop.It.

I understand that you might be a little upset with some doofuses out there who don’t honor this attribution thing that is pounded into the head of any decent blogger out there, but they are a minority. By using this service from some company called Tynt you are insulting those bloggers out there who do care about doing things the right way.

And if you think that I’m being a little over board on this well .. I’m not the only one who is feeling this way. both John Gruber from Daring Fireball and Mike Masnick from Techdirt have said much the same thing – albeit a little politer, but then I’m not in the mood to be polite about this.

As Gruber says in his post (see proper attribution at work):

It’s a bunch of user-hostile SEO bullshit.

Everyone knows how copy and paste works. You select text. You copy. When you paste, what you get is exactly what you selected. The core product of the “copy/paste company” is a service that breaks copy and paste.

The pitch from Tynt to publishers is that their clipboard jiggery-pokery allows publishers to track where text copied from their website is being used, on the assumption that whoever is pasting the text is leaving the Tynt-inserted attribution URL, with its gibberish-looking tracking ID. This is, I believe, a dubious assumption. Who, when they paste such text and find this “Read more:” attribution line appended, doesn’t just delete it (and wonder how it got there)?

Mike was a lot calmer:

As someone who does a fair bit of copying and pasting in writing this blog, I agree with Gruber that this is a bit of a nuisance. It’s not a hugely annoying thing, but it is annoying. If I’m copying and pasting from your website, I know what your website is, and I am already planning to link back to it. Adding that superfluous text is just annoying and basically forcing my computer to do something I did not ask it to do.

This isn’t happening on just small blogs either that are doing this but rather big name blogs like Wired, SFGate, New Yorker and TechCrunch (which by the way though an error every time).

Quit hijacking my cut and paste is a post from: The Inquisitr

The recent uptick in content site acquisition continues with the acquisition of sports gossip blog The Big Lead by the Fantasy Sports Ventures for “low seven figures.”

The Big Lead pitches itself as a more polite version of Gawker Media sports gossip blog Deadspin, and covers the full gauntlet of American sports.

The New York Times notes in an interview with the founder of The Big Lead that the site had started as an anonymously written blog in 2006 before going on to be named by Sports Illustrated as “one of the five most influential sports blogs of the decade.”

The stats on this deal make it particularly interesting. The owner claims the site does 3 million page views a month, with Alexa and Compete coinge in at 18,618 and 8,306. Those figures are respectable, but it’s rare to see a content acquisition in “low seven figures” at those sorts of numbers, at least in recent years.

We reported earlier today that BuzzMedia had acquired three sites, and now we have yet another deal (along with Forbes/ TrueSlant and Yahoo/ Associated Content.) It’s not impossible that the surge in acquisitions in the content space lately is a blip, and we’ve seen little flurries in the market before; my feeling is that these acquisitions point to a return to a strong market following a serious downturn during the global financial crisis.

Sports Blog The Big Lead Acquired For “Low Seven Figures” As Content Market Surges is a post from: The Inquisitr

The market for content based websites continues to heat up with news today that Forbes has acquired new media startup True/Slant.

Launched in April 2009 by former AOL News head Lewis Dvorkin, True/Slant combines the effort of over 300 freelance writers in 18 categories, offering a pitch of “quality” analysis and discussion on the news of the day.

As part of the acquisition, Dvorkin will step into the role of Forbes’ Chief Product Officer from June 1.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but is speculated to be single figure millions. The site had previously raised $3 million in a round that included Forbes and Fuse Capital.

Traffic according to True/Slant comes in at 1.5 million uniques, although page views weren’t disclosed. Public figures include an Alexa rank of 9,989 and Compete of 2,446. Quantcast direct measure puts page views at 2.6 million; we’d guess the real figure would be around the 3.5 million mark.

The interesting aspect of the True/Slant business model is one of syndication: the site doesn’t do a lot of advertising and instead seeks to resell/ syndicate its content on other sites and in traditional media. It makes it hard to guess what sort of money they are making, and to put an accurate figure on an acquisition price, but based on the public stats, we’d think single figure millions is probably about right.

The True/Slant acquisition follows the acquisition of content provider Associated Content last week by Yahoo, and shows that after a lull during the global financial crisis, interest in acquiring new media content plays has returned. That’s naturally a good thing for anyone operating in the market.

Content Market Heats Up As Forbes Acquires True/Slant is a post from: The Inquisitr

News May 19 that an offer had been made to acquire Perezhilton.com for $20 million has raised some interesting questions about valuing blogs.

Any exit in the tens of millions for a celebrity gossip blog does show that the space has value, but the figure relative to the traffic raises concerns over whether $20 million is a fair valuation.

The Traffic Equation

On traffic alone, $20 million grossly undervalues PerezHilton.com. According to public stats, the site does something in the vicinity of 200-300 million page views a month on 8-10 million uniques.

The uniques figure vs the page views figure is relatively low, which could drive down the acquisition price, but at this level other public stats need to be considered, such as 572 on Alexa and 844 on Compete. That’s a reflection on the reach PerezHilton.com has, even before we get to the influence the site has over Hollywood Gossip.

Consider that ContentNext (the publishes of Paid Content) were acquired for $30 million and they do 600,000 uniques a month: sure, celebrity gossip doesn’t convert as well in ads, but does the $20 million for PerezHilton.com sound fair by comparison?

The Personal Brand Fail

Mario Lavandeira has done an amazing job with the Perez Hilton brand, but it’s a catch 22 when it comes to selling the site: blogs closely affiliated with a person are devalued by the link, vs a stand alone brand. Although Perez Hilton isn’t Lavandeira’s real name, it’s the name he uses everywhere he goes, so it is intrinsically linked to him; you couldn’t simply swap him out and give someone else the name.

The question then becomes one of how the site would go without Lavandeira there. Content is the easy part: by all accounts the site is now exclusively written by ghost writers, so not having Lavandeira there to write wouldn’t change much. The hard part is assessing how much of the sites success is due to Lavandeira’s self promotion skills vs the quality of the site.

My suspicion is without Lavandeira the site would still be successful, but not nearly as much as it is now.

Simple Money Math

One unique thing about PerezHilton.com is that we can make an educated guess on how much money the site makes as the ad rates are publicly available on BlogAds.com

The taller ads take $10,000 a week, and the smaller ads take $4000, with next to no discounting for longer buys (the monthly rate is the same as buying 4 single weeks.) There’s 7 x $10,000/ wk and 1x $4,000, so say $74,000 a week. We’ll call it $70,000 a week as there are some smaller non-US ads running, and to allow for slower weeks.

That’s roughly $225,000 a month. He pays for writers, hosting, admin, accounting and legal, which is hard to put a price on but say $50,000-$100,000 /mth range, meaning the site nets at least $100,000 a month, if not closer to $150,000.

At $100,000 a month, that puts the acquisition price of $20 million at 20x monthly net. That’s not a good number for a premium blog buy; 8-15x monthly net is a multiple for a standard, fairly ordinary blog, not a premium blog like PerezHilton.com. Presuming the $100,000 net figure is right, I’d put the price on the site of something closer to $30-40 million, so a 30-40x multiple on net. I’ve seen blogs sell though for up to 80x net, so it could potentially be worth more.

That said, given the aforementioned personal branding problems and inherent risk in the acquisition, 20x might be a reasonable enough figure, be it a surprising one.

I Wouldn’t Hit It

Suitors Avid Media know the business well, and are well qualified to run the site, however if I had the money to spend I wouldn’t use it to buy PerezHilton.com. The brand is too linked to Lavandeira, and inserting Zack Taylor and Nik Richie in to run the site and write for it is a recipe for fail. Richie has been successful running The Dirty, but there’s a distinct difference in style. Zack Taylor is a lesser known quality: a better fit perhaps in writing style, but running a site with an Alexa rank of 180,000 odd with a .ca address doesn’t exactly shout “I’m capable of running PerezHilton.com,” does it

Conclusion

From a blog market perspective, the attempt to acquire PerezHilton.com is interesting because top of the market blogs rarely come into play. I’d suggest that while the $20 million might undervalue the site, it’s not a site that would be easy to sell, nor particularly a desirable acquisition.

Lavandeira would be mad to turn down the offer, but likewise given the leverage it offers him, I doubt he will accept it either.

Valuing Blogs: Is $20 Million For PerezHilton.com The Right Figure? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Avid Life Media, the parent company of esteemed web properties like HotorNot.com, Mancrunch and married-people dating site Ashley Madison, has put in a $20m bid for PerezHilton.com, Gawker has verified.

The company, who is said to have paid roughly the same amount for HotorNot.com in 2008, has teamed up with celebrity bloggers Zack Taylor (zacktaylor.ca) and Nik Richie (TheDirty.com)- sending a Letter of Intent with the $20m offer. ($18m up front and $2m in escrow for the next year.)

The offer, presented by “Avid Life subsidiary Eight Days Inc., along with Zack Taylor and Dirty World LLC,” seems to suggest Perez may not be as involved with day to day operations of the site as he may be now- Gawker quotes the letter:

The letter states that “The Purchaser presently intends to continue, in the normal course, the employment of all employees of the Business from and after the Closing Date.” But it also says that following the purchase, Zack Taylor and Nik Richie “will operate the business.” It’s our understanding that the intention is to use the PerezHilton.com address as a sort of massive traffic-forwarding address to a new gossip site run by Taylor and Richie.

Gawker asked what Perez’s future involvement with the site might be if he accepts the offer, but Avid Life spokesperson Steph Davidson said she could not comment because she didn’t know for sure what the celebrity blogger’s role would be if the bid is accepted.

Perez hasn’t commented on the offer yet or whether he intends on taking it. PerezHilton.com was valued at $32m last year, but $20m is a tremendous incentive for Perez to cash out and move on.

Gawker: Avid Life Media bids $20m for PerezHilton.com is a post from: The Inquisitr