AOL will fire 700 employees according to a memo sent to all staff by CEO Randy Falco today.

Included in the cuts is a freeze on “merit” pay rises for 2009.

Among the cuts is also said to be the Weblogs Inc lifestyle blogs, according to a report from ReadWriteWeb.

Sites to go include Aisle Dash, Gadling, Green Daily, Luxist, ParentDish, Slashfood, DIY Life, StyleList and That’s Fit. The RWW report suggests that the sites might be relaunched later as magazine style sites.

The move to cut more Weblogs Inc sites comes despite promises from the company that previous cuts were the final ones, and that the network was thriving, and expanding. I guess like most things coming from AOL, a pinch of salt is always required. While many of the writers will pick up new gigs, what I’ve been hearing from many in the market at the moment is reasonable paying blogging jobs are drying up, and a flood of newly qualified writers may actually push writing pay rates further down as more scramble for less.

Related posts:

1. AOL to close services, Weblogs Inc blogs affected
2. AOL launches new blogs. PS: I was wrong on Weblogs Inc
3. 3 year later, AOL Weblogs Inc is thriving with brilliant numbers

As we end 2008, the year ahead offers the biggest challenge ever in the history of blogging.

Although blogging dates back to the beginning of the first dot com boom, it truly came of age as the second bubble grew. From the rise of the political bloggers in 2004, blogging became mainstream, and with that came money and commercialism.

Blogging is more than its commercial endeavors, and as a non-commercial platform for networking, global communication and sharing blogging has many great days ahead of it, and may actually boom in 2009 after a dip in popularity over 2007 and 2008 as social networks became a first choice of communications and networking outlet for many.

But the commercial side of blogging is facing a difficult year. The same issues that face the broader Tech and Web 2.0 spheres face blogging: a dearth of VC, declining ad revenues, and even tougher competition as many try to compensate for lower ad revenues by driving even more traffic.

The dangers for commercial blog owners come on a number of fronts, but there’s one trend we’ve already seen begin.

The rise of the Uber Blog

Some may moan at the use of the word uber, so feel free to substitute it with big or large, because the meaning remains the same. An Uber Blog is a blog that combines different content streams into one large blog, with one primary top level url. The Huffington Post is an example I’ve used before. The blending of content can be in related fields, or non related fields; for example, you might blend specialties in tech into the one tech blog.

It has already begun

In a post asking whether the blog network model is dying, I made similar observations on a number of companies, some I’ll repeat here

ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb has gone from a traditional blog network in to the uber blog model. Owner Richard McManus gave away or sold the two blogs in the network, at the same time he was launching new blogs under the ReadWriteWeb brand. The reason given by Richard: a focus on the core brand.

Silicon Alley Insider

Henry Blodget merged the two blogs outside of Silicon Alley Insider into sub-urls on alleyinsider.com. While each blog maintains their own name and heading, they are now all parts of alleyinsider itself as opposed to standalone blogs.

Gawker Media

In between selling blogs, Nick Denton merged Valleywag into Gawker on a sub-url. Valleywag keeps its header and name, but is now a column of Gawker.

b5media

b5media hasn’t yet started blending blogs into larger blogs, but has instead undertaken a variation of the theme: branded portals. Content from b5media’s business and celebrity channels fall under the banner of a larger site, which also acts as a gateway to the content.

Why one large blog?

The reasoning behind the move is remarkably simple: it’s easy to sell ads on one blog vs many blogs, for a couple of reasons. The biggest is simply traffic: having one big blog means increased traffic to the core blog making the sales pitch more appealing. Second, advertisers will often want to target the one blog and not buy the subsidiary blogs; maybe not always, but none the less common in my experience. If you have one big blog with various streams you’ve got better odds of getting high value advertising against all the content.

Expanding outside the niche

Having sub blogs within a large blog, or amalgamating smaller blogs gives commercial blog operators the ability to broaden their content range outside of a specific niche, often with the advantage of not necessarily polluting the core product. The content for example on Silicon Alley Insider and ReadWriteWeb’s sub-blogs is complimentary, and allows both sites to increase content outside the core sites focus, driving growth and new visitors to the product as whole.

Three companies that haven’t blended blogs but could or should

TechCrunch

Michael Arrington followed the typical blog network route with the TechCrunch blogs, launching new sites on new urls. The problem with the network is that it has never produced a hit that has come close to TechCrunch itself. Excluding the country specific sites that site on the techcrunch.com url (except Japan), sites like CrunchGear haven’t delivered (for reference, with a yearly budget that wouldn’t cover one months wages at CrunchGear, we have more traffic according to Quantcast). CrunchGear though isn’t a bad site, it just lacks for eyeballs because it’s not part of TechCrunch itself. Perfect candidate for a sub-blog, like crunchgear.techcrunch.com. The same goes for Mobile and Enterprise. Despite his dislike of me, Arrington is a smart bloke, and I’d bet we see at least one of these sites blended this year, if not all of them.

GigaOm

Om Malik has been buying blogs in a tight market, expanding his network at a time most others aren’t. The unique thing about the network is that gigaom.com doesn’t dominate it, accounting for 31.7% of traffic vs second place TheAppleBlog with 26.9%. However, a number of small blogs would appear to be struggling alone, and would make prime candidates for folding into the leading site.

AOL Weblogs Inc

AOL has continued to go wide, aggressively expanding the network they acquired from Jason Calacanis 4 year ago. AOL does have a couple of obvious strengths: the ability to sell ads across the network, and the leverage of AOL.com to pump new sites. They have already though started to group sites around key brands such as Engadget, and I’d suggest in a tightening market that grouping, being it masthead or subdomains/ sub blogs could come into play in 2009.

Conclusion

In 2009 big will be better. Not big networks of many sites, but big blogs that break out of the narrow niche focus that has been typical of commercial blogging until now, and instead go wide in content but focused on one brand and one url.

The rise of the uber blog will also mark the beginning of the time new media starts to surpass old media. The thing holding back new media to date has been its obsession with niche plays that didn’t naturally lead to scale that sets them up well to compete with old media titans that went wide online as they did offline in print. The new media uber blogs of 2009 and beyond will offer real substitution of old media like we haven’t really seen before, and with lean structures that are best placed to last the recession, could ultimately emerge on top.

Related posts:

1. DogTime: the largest blog network you’ve probably never heard of
2. b5media abandons wide model in favor of uber blogs
3. Surviving the recession: blog networks raise good money in 2009

Gawker Media was the first notable blog network, but Weblogs Inc was the first to truly go wide quickly in pursuit if growth. That Weblogs Inc model became the inspiration to many, from b5media, a company I was a co-founder of, through to hundreds of smaller and some larger players. Networks thrived during the good times as advertising rates climbed as companies flooded the space in pursuit of targeting blog readers, and blogging itself continued to grow.

In 2008 however, the picture is rapidly changing. The glory days of blog growth has passed, and while many blogs still grow (including this one), many don’t as market saturation makes the market harder than it has ever been. Throw in the economic crisis, and a slowing in online advertising growth, and things are starting to look grim.

The blog network model is under threat.

We reported November 3 that ReadWriteWeb has closed its blog network. Others including Glam Media are facing difficulties (although Glam is a hybrid network + ad network), and the father of blog networks Nick Denton is predicting a 40% drop in ad rates for 2009, after making widespread cuts around his network.

Weblogs Inc sites are thriving, although the company has had a complete makeover since being acquired by AOL 3 years ago. Many of the tech/ special interest blogs have been dumped in favor of a primarily lifestyle play, supported by the AOL portal itself, and the company is shifting to full time employees over the previous standard blog network contractor model. So while they offer good news, they are not a typical case.

One brand advantage

ReadWriteWeb while dumping its blog network is instead launching new blogs under the ReadWriteWeb banner (and on the ReadWriteWeb URL). The inspiration actually lies in traditional media to some extent, but I call this the Huffington Post model. The Huffington Post was an inspiration to the founding of this site, because they proved that you can mix different streams of content on a blog successfully on the one large site under the one brand.

The problem with going wide in a network is the need to have to build individual brands vs a single brand. By increasing content under the one url and one brand, you strengthen that brand instead of splitting your time between promoting multiple brands, even when those brands reside in the one network.

There’s also one other advantage the single brand/ blog method has: it’s easier to sell ads on one site than many sites. Often advertisers aren’t interested in network buys, and may prefer a one site buy over many (particularly where the verticals in the network are different), least this is my experience in the past. It’s easier selling 750,000 page views on one site than 2 million on 10 sites.

Vertical bundling?

My former company b5media was one of the best cases of a wide blog network model. At funding, the company had 250 blogs, and peaked at 350 blogs before cutting back (I don’t have the full number, but it’s around 300 today). Notably b5media has started to launch portal destination sites for its content, such as Starked.com for celebrity news, and Bizzia.com for business news, not replacing individual blogs, but bundling content by vertical, and establishing individual brands for each space. I asked CEO Jeremy Wright the question, and his response came down to verticals

Our belief is still in the “wide” sense (vs say a single vertical) but that you need REACH within EACH of the verticals you cover for it to work. You can’t just do 300-400 blogs or whatever and hope some kind of magic happens. Plus, you need BRANDS.

Slow bleed

The blog network model is dying, although it may never die entirely, and companies such as Weblogs Inc, Gawker, Shiny Media, b5media and others will likely have long futures ahead of them. For those starting new today, the days of building many sites, splitting the focus away from a key brand has passed, and the likelihood of new successful blog networks emerging in the short term is slim at best.

We are likely to see consolidation in the space over the coming years, as titles fold, merge, or join new entities, but even consolidation can lead back to the main brand, for example the Crikey blog network saw existing stand alone blogs come under the one URL, so although the brands continue to exist in some ways, they do so in a way that contributes to the overall brand.

The days of launching dozens of new sites under different URLs has definitely passed. The big blogs of tomorrow will likely be mega-sites that often focus on content outside a key vertical, under the one brand.

(img credit)

Related posts:

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Fast forward to 2005 and Weblogs Inc became the biggest acquisition of a blog network, being acquired by AOL for a reported $25 million. Weblogs Inc’s success was an inspiration to many of us in the blogging space, and although we never directly competed, Weblogs Inc’s success (pre acquisition) was deep in our minds when I founded b5media with Darren Rowse and Jeremy Wright in May of the same year.

The third anniversary of AOL’s acquisition of Weblogs Inc is today, and I had the opportunity to speak with Marty Moe, the current head of operations at Weblogs Inc prior to the third anniversary, and the figures he shared with me are nothing short of staggering. Here’s a walk through on the presentation he sent me, and my notes from it.

Weblogs Inc Circa October 2005

The key figures: 1.7 million unique visitors on 6.5 million page views. 4 employees.

Weblogs Inc Circa October 2008

The numbers speak for themselves. 19 million unique visitors, 13 million in the United States vs 2 million at acquisition. Page views up from 6 million to 81 million in the US, 106 million globally.

Weblogs Inc has also started a shift away from the low cost freelance model that Calacanis championed, to full time employees. The number has gone from 4 to 26. I specifically asked Moe the exact makeup of the full time employees, and where they reside. His response is that most of them are editorial/ writers for the Weblogs Inc blogs. He noted that AOL believe it is important that key staff work primarily on Weblogs Inc blogs, and not as a hobby. He clarified this in saying that freelance bloggers will always be an important part of the mix, but they believed that their key bloggers should be full time employees dedicated to their sites alone. He also said that AOL would be looking to increase the number of full time employees.

I asked whether the full time employees had to report to an office in a central location, and Moe was quick to jump on this. Most of the full time employees in Weblogs Inc work from their own location; Moe said that it would allow them to employee someone from New Zealand as an example, who couldn’t check in to a central office.

The flagship: Engadget

As it was in its pre-AOL owned days, Engadget remains the flagship of the Weblogs Inc network. Interestingly the site now gets significantly more international traffic than US traffic. The Engadget sites outside Engadget itself have grown strongly.

I asked Moe about branding: in particular, the occasionally confusing branding statements out of AOL that included Engadget. At one stage, Engadget was the AOL Tech Channel, but now it seems to be a brand in it’s own right.

Moe admitted to some experimentation in the past, not all of it successful. He claims that the days of confused branding are behind the network, and that AOL now fully understood the benefits of brands within the network.

Broader network

There were a number of other slides I won’t share, mostly because they deliver the same positive message. The notable parts: The Joystiq network is doing numbers that are close to the Engadget network. WowInsider in now nearly as big as Joystiq itself. The Autoblog network is seen as a huge growth opportunity for AOL. The existing network is pumping 14 million page views a month, and Autoblog will offer country sites for the UK, France and Germany before the end of the year.

What is impressive is the influence of the blogging culture over AOL as a whole

The Blogsmith blogging platform in the center of this push. The slide says 700 blogs, but this includes closed blogs (but sill live) and internal blogs, so the total number of actual blogs being updated publicly today is less than half that figure.

But the mix of sites is telling. TMZ, which isn’t usually lumped in with Weblogs Inc is actually part of the network, and is doing huge numbers. There’s a range of other sites, some obviously blogs, some not so much, that are being powered by Blogsmith.

I asked Moe whether the Blogsmith platform may one day be offered outside of AOL, given rumors in that direction over several years. He said that it had been discussed previously, but no decision had been made.

The biggest and the best

This slide speaks for itself.

Conclusion

I have been harsh of AOL’s treatment of Weblogs Inc in the past, but I have since corrected the record. AOL is using the Weblogs Inc setup as a consumer play, and it is delivering in traffic for them. I asked Moe whether the network might one day go niche again (particularly in tech), and he didn’t rule it out, but confirmed that their strength was in consumer sites, and that’s their current direction.

The growth numbers are staggering in terms of the broader blog network scene, and credit where it is due, AOL has done an amazing job with the company they purchased.

As a last aside, I asked Moe about the economic crisis, and Weblogs Inc’s exposure to it. Moe told me that they intend on increasing their investment in blogs during this time to make sure they remain on top in terms of traffic and reach. Advertising may decline, but sites with growing traffic are better able to counter the decline.

Related posts:

1. AOL launches new blogs. PS: I was wrong on Weblogs Inc
2. AOL to close services, Weblogs Inc blogs affected
3. AOL cuts 700, including Weblogs Inc lifestyle blogs

The first blog to launch in the network is Obsessable, a blog covering gadgets, with future blogs to cover personal electronics and eco-awareness among other things. I won’t be the only person to groan that yet another blog network has launched with a gadget blog, but ReadWriteWeb quotes Obseesable’s Features Editor Barb Dybwad saying the site is coming at a different angle:

“Obsessable covers personal technology and consumer electronics from the point of view of experts writing for people who may not be. This is consumer tech without the snark, where you don’t have to be a member of the techier-than-thou club to be a part of the community.”

Like Weblogs Inc before it, Crowd Fusion is being built on a custom built content management system (at Weblogs Inc it was BlogSmith). The angle is that the new CMS allows the team to do things they think are important in a better way, without relying on an existing platform such as MovableType (which powers Gawker Media sites among others) and WordPress.

Backed with $3 million from investors including Marc Andreessen and Ross Levinsohn, the list of team members reads like a walk down Weblogs Inc memory lane. Along with Alvey, Barb Dybwad was a former producer at Engadget, CTO Craig Wood was formerley a member of the Blogsmith team, COO Judith Meskill was at one time COO of Weblogs Inc, and CMO Steve Friedman was on the Weblogs Inc sales team…and that’s just the ones we know about so far.

The first site is impressive, and this is as smart a team as you could ever put together if you were starting a blog network from scratch. They know the business, and they know it well. However, there’s absolutely nothing ground breaking on Obsessable. It’s well designed and they’re spending good money on writing talent, but this is 2008, not 2004, and unlike the days where Weblogs Inc defined the serious blogging market, blogging is now mature, and the competition heavier than ever. I’m not suggesting the site and network won’t go well, and indeed I’d put money on it having some level of success, but I’m not seeing anything new that could be a huge hit in a way Weblogs Inc was…at least not yet. I also don’t get the obsession with building a CMS from scratch: it might make life easier but when you’re in the content game, your main concern should be the delivery of great content, and you don’t need a custom built CMS to do that. We will most definitely be watching Crowd Fusion closely in the coming months and years.

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The new sites are Lemondrop, covering women’s lifestyle, and PopEater, covering pop culture, and both join a stable of successful AOL lifestyle/ pop blogs including TMZ and Stylelist.

While the Weblogs Inc stable of blogs haven’t thrived at AOL (some of the tech blogs, such as Engadget aside), what we’ve seen is AOL use the base provided by Weblogs Inc, including the Blogsmith platform, to launch dozens of new sites in non-tech verticals. Blogging is driving AOL’s content play, and although many of the old Weblogs Inc titles a dying a slow death, they’re really irrelevant in the overall picture of how AOL is successfully delivering top blogs that work.

I don’t have any hard numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that AOL is now the biggest blogging network on the planet. Many of the new sites are thriving, presumably in part due to the new sites not being burdened by the pay structure and issues surrounding the Weblogs Inc titles.

Retrospect is always brilliant, so I’ll admit that my previous commentary myopically focused on the Weblogs Inc sites instead of the broader picture, and the numbers don’t lie, I was wrong. AOL is actually doing a lot of right things in blogging, and although there handling of Weblogs Inc could have been better, it’s the end result that counts.

Related posts:

1. AOL cuts 700, including Weblogs Inc lifestyle blogs
2. AOL to close services, Weblogs Inc blogs affected
3. 3 year later, AOL Weblogs Inc is thriving with brilliant numbers

According to their QBase entry, “Simplifying the management of sites and services that you already use like blogs and social networks, socialthing! synchronizes your personal information, content, and friendships so that you can post this information across the social web, as opposed to just having it contained in a single site.”

Socialthing can be added to a long list of AOL Acquisitions, including Truveo, Sphere, Bebo and Weblogs Inc. in the social space.

AOL may not be the most popular or most highly trafficked company on the web, but they’re like the little engine that could, they keep on trying, and they aren’t afraid to spend money to buy in destinations and tools to help them achieve their goals. Their success rate with acquisitions may not be perfect, and we’ve covered issues at Weblogs Inc previously, but they always seem to try their best with acquisitions, as opposed to Google who has a track record of letting acquisitions die off while completely ignoring existing user bases.

The question then becomes, who would you rather be acquired by? On their track record with acquisitions, and a company that is trying its hardest to deliver the best from acquired products, the answer for me at least would be AOL and I’m betting that I’m not alone in thinking that way either.

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It’s also not a case that blogs in the network are all losing money, instead “Moe also explained that many of the blogs that have faced cuts were struggling to reach a point of profitability that was desired.” The emphasis is mine, but it’s the key: desired profitability. Simply, many blogs aren’t making enough money.

But how much money is enough, and do blogs work well in corporate environments that emphasize profit margins?

Blog started as personal pages with no budgets or ROI tracking. Some evolved into businesses themselves, complete with budgets, wages and even marketing expenses, but compared to old media they are nearly always lean. Some make good money, but keep their expenses low, others balance expenses and profit, investing returns in their writers instead of themselves. As stand alone entities blogs even at the very top do not resemble large corporations or traditional media in any way. AOL is a large corporation that grew fat off its dialup business and is still struggling today to turn itself into something more streamlined and lean. Instead of continuing to run a lean ship at Weblogs Inc, AOL has instead fallen into the build it and they will come approach that included increasing staff numbers on the expectation that profits would follow. They have succeeded in some cases, but in others they have failed miserably. The ethos of a lean network under Jason Calacanis that emphasized growth opportunities while keeping costs under control has long disappeared, but this is to be expected from any large organization.

On profit, the acceptance of a blog with a small profit with or without growth potential but kept on none the less is replaced by the need to show significant profits from every blog in the network. Large corporations strictly number crunch every dollar, and those that don’t make the cut, even when profitable, lose support. And yet, in blogging we accept that some sites don’t make as much as others, that some will have a bigger margin, and we don’t necessarily hold one better than the other, at least as a value proposition in continuing trade. Blogs can be a fine margin business, and this will never sit well in a corporate setting.

Blogs can be successfully acquired, and will be so in the future, but the more blogs in a network, the easier the lean machine ethos is lost when a larger corporation acquires the blogs, unless of course they are kept as a separate business unit. AOL proves it.

Related posts:

1. Surviving the recession: blog networks raise good money in 2009
2. Why is blog advertising still difficult in 2008?
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Of the services being cut, most would be unfamiliar names to most reading this, perhaps for some with the exception of the online storage service Xdrive, acquired by AOL in August 2005. This lack of consumer awareness for all four products is the exact reason behind their closure.

The changes at Weblogs Inc include the closure of DIY Life, and content cuts among a number of blogs including The Unofficial Apple Weblog and DownloadSquad.

DIY Life will be put on “hiatus” starting August 1, although noted internally that it may be resurrected in the future. DIY Life launched in July 31st, 2007, and was billed as “Covering the spectrum of DIY, the blog provides a steady stream of DIY projects, how-to’s, ideas, tips, reviews, even safety recalls.”

The content cuts across other Weblogs Inc blog will have more impact. Writers have been told to cease posting to blogs within the network until August 1, with some exceptions. The memo refers to all “DLS” bloggers within Weblogs Inc, but it’s not clear from my research exactly which blogs are covered in this definition. The L could represent lifestyle, so blogs not being updated may include Gadling, Green Daily, Luxist, ParentDish, Slashfood, Styledash and That’s Fit. S for sports blogs, but the D is a mystery, as Weblogs Inc labels its tech blogs under technology and gaming. PaidContent names Download Squad and The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), suggesting that blogs in the technology and gaming streams may be broadly affected. TUAW is named as an exception, with a limited number of app reviews able to be posted during this time. There is no mention on Engadget, although it is unlikely that AOL would shut down posting on the networks leading blog, and as of the time of writing Engadget had fresh material on the site.

It’s a risky move by AOL. Ceasing production on a range of blogs, even for a week, will result in readers looking elsewhere for content, and although many may return, the longer the blogs remain idle, the less likely that will happen.

The question that also should be asked is how AOL has turned a company that was seemingly thriving under Jason Calacanis into a growing burial ground for blogs. These cuts are far from the first in the Weblogs Inc stable, and they won’t be the last. Were they too ambitious in trying to grow the network, subsequently failing to master verticals as they went along, or is it simply poor management? We may never know.

Related posts:

1. AOL cuts 700, including Weblogs Inc lifestyle blogs
2. AOL launches new blogs. PS: I was wrong on Weblogs Inc
3. 3 year later, AOL Weblogs Inc is thriving with brilliant numbers