A new bloggin venture is launching – WeblogsInc. From their site:
Weblogs, Inc. is a B2B Web site dedicated to creating niche Weblogs (a.k.a. blogs) across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product.
Weblogs, Inc. is creating a new layer on top of the traditional business-to-business media that:
saves professionals the time associated with reading dozens of B2B publications by providing a non-stop, top-level summary of the news;
provides analytical tools that give readers the ability to sort and search stories by subtopics within an industry;
gives users the ability to participate by engaging in discussions, ranking stories and by submitting their own blogs (i.e., pointers and summaries of stories on other sites); and
promotes fairness and truth in reporting by acting as a public forum where industry professionals can participate.
The idea looks interesting. I wrote to them a few days ago asking for more information, and haven’t yet received a reply.
Meanwhile, Wired News has more, quoting co-founder Jason Calacanis:
Calacanis’ goal is to turn Weblogsinc into an umbrella for blogs, a for-profit center that dishes daily on as many as 300 topics and scores revenue from sources like advertising, events and classified listings. He expects the topics to fall under four main categories: media, finance, technology and life sciences.
For now, Calacanis’ plans for Weblogsinc are unclear. He does say that before too long he plans to introduce some well-known members of the digerati to his fold. But once again, he’s not naming names.
What he will say is that he expects Weblogsinc will have little problem bringing in revenue, especially since the more individual blogs it has, the more opportunities for ad sales and conference tie-ins it will spawn. And once the word gets out about Weblogsinc, he argues, the more bloggers will want to hop on board and share the wealth.
“A thousand dollars a week in ad revenue (per blog) is not that hard if we can scale,” he says. “The architecture is already built, and it scales nicely. We can just add more weblogs.”
Nick Denton has some advice on niche B2B vertical sites, and thinks that “Calacanis is making a few mistakes, and will have to alter course if he’s to be successful.” Nick’s two micro-sites (Gawker and Gizmodo) only do about USD 2,000 a month each in ad revenue, barely enough to cover costs.
