How do they make money - Jason Calacanis

Jason Calacanis and WebLogsInc is reported as having a healthy income in the BlogHerald

News from the Google Analyst Day that Jason Calacanis’ Weblogsinc is bringing in over $600 USD per day in Adsense revenue and made $45,000 USD in its first 4 months with the program, which would put its yearly take from Adsense revenue alone to in excess of $180,000 per year based on this early figure, but with continued growth amongst the Weblogsinc sites and regular new additions to the network, we are guessing that the figure will be closer to $250,000 USD over 12 months.

This, coupled with strong private advertising sales for a number of the more high profile Weblogsinc properties, could well be propelling Weblogsinc towards the $1 million USD advertising revenue figure.

Weblogs Inc. is the purveyor of a network of more than 70 blogs, which it characterizes as the world’s largest. The company is dedicated to creating trade blogs across industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product. Weblogs Inc. network categories include Consumer, Technology, Wireless, Video Games, Media & Entertainment, Business, Life Sciences, Personal, and Events.

Our goal is to partner with individual bloggers, letting them do what they do best (writing, creating community, researching) and support them with what we do best (upgrading the software that drives their Web site, generating revenue, running the business). We split the profits 50/50 with each of our bloggers taking out only hard costs (i.e., sales commissions, credit card fees).

We also allow bloggers to leave our network at any time, for any reason, and take their content with them.

It would appear that it is WebLogsInc who is making the money here, rather than the individual boggers, who get half their blog's income (less "hard costs"). WebLogsInc boasts a netwoork of 70 blogs, which get a total of $600 a day from AdSense. In other words each blog is earning around $9 a day, and the blogger gets half that.

Regular advertising could bring in maybe twice this, so the individual blogger could be earning $10 to $15 a day from blogging. $5000 is not going to make the individual blogger rich, but if WebLogsInc can also clear $5000 a year from each blogger in their stable, then the economies to scale start to kick in once they get over, say, 100 bloggers all scribbling away for them.

Bloggers can leave, but if they are made to feel loved enough, may be inclined enough to earn a pittance per hour for their labours, after all the Open Directory has thousands labouring away for nothing. Name of the game here is to sign up bloggers, and that would seem to be an achievable goal.