How much is your website worth? That’s not an easy question to answer, but one way to measure the value is to look at the metrics of sites that have already been sold. One popular example of this is Weblogs, Inc’s sale to AOL last October.

Rafat Ali of Paidcontent had the scoop last night that AOL was acquiring Weblogs, Inc.
Now we’ve got Jason Calacanis confirming the sale/purchase.
Other big blogs commenting:
Adrants
Sean Bonner
MarketingVox
gapingvoid
Blogebrity actually ha…

Bloggers who work for Weblogs Inc, newly acquired by AOL for $25 million, soon will have ownership of their content; vastly increased exposure through AOLs subscriber network; and other favorable terms yet to be announced. But there’s no more than an …

The employees of Weblogs — the bloggers in this case — are probably part-time and make modest wages by newspaper standards. (This is a guess on my part, but probably a good one) Does that change — do they make more money as a result of the sale? Your memo seems to allude to the potential of an increase but no fortune.

Do the bloggers — who helped make Weblogs successful — get any of the proceeds from the $25 million? Maybe they have, and if so — that’s wonderful, but if not read on.

If you were working for an e-commerce start-up and the company was sold or went public, chances are you made money because of stock options.

What I see happening is this: Writers — bloggers — are taking *jobs* for no money or scant money with start-up firms that happen to be blogs. They are contributing ideas and copy with no promise of reward, nothing akin to a stock option or a piece of the business if they help build something valuable.

The Weblogs Inc. sale ought to be a wake-up call to bloggers. The message from this sale seems to be that their contributions and efforts may be worth more than they realize.

If I was working for a start-up, contributing time, effort and ideas for little pay or no pay, I want to be certain that if I helped build a valuable property that there would be a significant reward for that effort. I think some writers might be bitter if owners pocket millions and the people who were asked to give their all to help a new business are left with nothing or little.

Again, I don’t know the details of the Weblogs Inc./AOL agreement, so these comments are general.

But the $25 million sale price is an eye opener and should prompt bloggers to assess the value they bring to a start-up and whether they should have the same potential for reward as those who work for other companies.

(Regarding the contract terms for writers .. I LOL over this one: “The new contract will allow the bloggers to own their own content offline” — big whoop. Is there any evidence of an offline blogging content?)

There was hardly anything innovative going on at WebLogs Inc that they needed to be bought as a whole company.

I don’t understand why the word “blog” gets people excited. It is mainly posting a message on a website. That has been happening since the beginning of the internet and only now has it gotten a catchy word.