Business 2.0 has an intriguing piece about Nick Denton, Jason Calacanis and John Battelle. Apparently, Battelle intends to join the blog publishing fray, as an enabler, not an outright owner of the individual media properties.
His plan is to offer himself as a publisher-as-service to blogging entities. He’d aggregate traffic, sell category-specific advertising against the sites in the FM network, and handle the back-end business and tech issues. He’s done much of this for BoingBoing, where he’s been acting as “band manager,” as he puts it, for more than a year to generate cash from the site. Calacanis, who is definitely a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats type, offered, via e-mail, this rosy summary of Battelle’s accomplishments there: “John did an amazing job over the past six months taking BoingBoing from ad/revenue-free to ad/revenue-filled without upsetting the user base or the four bloggers. I understand it makes $40k a month and is growing … so $500,000 a year across five folks is a nice living … if John can do that 10 more times he has a very powerful business.” (Battelle says, “We don’t talk about numbers, but they are in the right range, if a bit high.”) BoingBoing has already signed up as FM Publishing’s first client, provided Battelle can get his company off the ground.
For your edification, Technorati ranks Boing Boing as the number one blog in existence, using incoming links as the measure.
Boing Boing: 21,914 links from 14,042 sources.
Matt Drudge, also known to make some decent dig, has far fewer inbound links (but infinitely more than AdPulp).
Drudge Report: 12,979 links from 10,555 sources.
