Brian Alvey: Blogging in the wind

Our original wave of blog consolidations at the end of June saw nine understaffed or low traffic subdomain blogs like The RSS Weblog, The Open Source Weblog and our unofficial Microsoft, Google and Yahoo weblogs get retired. Most of the active bloggers made their way to Download Squad and we were already covering Yahoo, Google and Microsoft over at Blogging Stocks.

Our second wave included ten more blogs that also made better sense as occasionally covered Download Squad topics, like Flash Insider, CSS Insider and The JavaScript Weblog.

At the end of the year we did another survey to see which blogs were candidates for consolidation. A couple of days ago we finalized our list and started letting our bloggers know.

They'll get to break the news to their audiences in their own words, so I won't be talking about the specific blogs here. Many of these bloggers are already finding new gigs across the network on blogs like Engadget, Download Squad, Slashfood, Gadling, TV Squad and Blogging Stocks.

The net result with the blogs we've added in the last few months is only a small decrease in the number of blogs, but I agree with Nick when he says that it's not the number of blogs in your stable, it's the stable of numbers in your blog. Something like that.

Part of the reason for this natural expansion and contraction that we go through isn't just about the per-blog profitability. One of the facts of this business is that larger group blogs require less management than a one-man blog. If someone leaves a one-man blog you have to scramble to find a qualified replacement, send contracts back and forth and then train your new blogger. On a group blog, the existing team trains new bloggers and the loss of a part-time blogger or two doesn't require immediate attention.

Taking a bunch of small single-topic, single-blogger blogs and moving them into Download Squad reduces major psychic strain in addition to minor fiscal strain.

The bottom line is that Weblogs, Inc. is expanding like crazy. We're beating the previous month's revenue every single month for as far back as I can see and we're increasing traffic at a staggering rate.

Comments (2)

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David Krug 1146 days ago

Thanks for your openness and transparency on this. I hope people read your site as much as they devoured Calacanis' during his WINc stint.
Shiva 1145 days ago

How do I propose an all new category of weblogs of definite interest to a large segment of the world population ? Spirituality ...Please feel free to remove this entry if after you have read the message. I tried to load the contact page at weblogsInc and it did not.

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