Successful Ad Blocking Networks: Weblogs, Inc., Gawker Media and Federated Media.

Weblogs, Inc

Weblogs, Inc was created on September 24, 2003 by two friends, by that time already well-known internet business activists, Jason Calacanis and Brian Alway. Well-known American businessman Mark Kyuban helped them with investments.
Initially, the network consisted of dozens of blogs located on weblogsinc.com subdomains
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Gradually, the company expanded the theme of blogs, moving towards the consumer sector, which was quite logical, due to the clear commercial orientation of the project. At the beginning of 2006, the network included 26 “stand-alone” blogs and about 50 blogs located on subdomains. During this period, the company already employed 8 people of the administrative group, plus about 180 contract bloggers.
One of the most famous blogs that joined Weblogs in its infancy was Engadget . Participation in the network of this resource was a significant fact for the company, since Peter Rojas, the author of Engadget, was also one of the founders of Gizmodo , a member of the Gawker Media network.
The source of profit for Weblogs, inc was display advertising in conjunction with Google AdSense, which subsequently began to bring 2,000-3,000 thousand dollars a day.

Calakanis outlined the business model and principles of his company:
“... We shared 50/50 profits with each of our bloggers. We also allow bloggers to leave our network at any time, for any reason, and to accept the content of their blogs with them. The concept of our agreement is that if you are with us, but you want to take a vacation in a year, you can take all your content and do everything you want with it. Our only condition is that we keep our copy of the content that is already in our archive. We believe that this is a fair agreement and it is possible that it promotes open partnership. Like we want to create with our bloggers. ”

On October 6, 2005, the Weblogs, Inc. network was purchased by AOL ( Time Warner ) for $ 25 million. At the time of the transaction, Weblogs included about 80 blogs. The total number of page views of all blogs included in the network was about 30 million. The number of referrals from RSS is 25 million.

Gawker media

Gawker Media is another company that has become a leader in blog-oriented media business.

After receiving a degree in economics from the University of Oxford, Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, worked for a long time as a correspondent for the Financial Times, but in the late nineties he got carried away with his own business ideas focused on Internet business ...

Founded in 2002 by Gawker, it gradually increased its resources. Denton does not disclose information about financial achievements, but based on visible indicators, we can assume that the annual turnover of Gawker is about 10 million dollars.

The specificity of Gawker, in a sense, reflects the personality of Denton himself - a bit eccentric, completely creative and adventurous person. Weblogs are focused on popular, popular topics.
The company's main site, Gawker.com, is a tabloid that publishes celebrity stories and collects about 3 million page views every month. Also, Gawker is the only successful blog network that includes a porn resource.

Federated Media

John Battelle is a journalist, a professor at Berkeley University, an entrepreneur, and one of the founders of Wired and Wired Ventures. This person is one of the most recognized experts in the field of publishing business on the Internet.

The project was launched in early 2005. It is important to note that the success of Batelle was based on an exceptionally serious attitude to the content provided and a systematic approach to building the entire business. Undoubtedly, Battele is a very talented and competent specialist. He managed to build a strong marketing framework for his business, created to ensure effective cooperation between bloggers and advertisers.
Estimated company earns about 2 million dollars a month. 60% of this amount goes to network partners.
In a recent interview, Battele estimated his campaign at $ 400 million.

via AD28.ru