AOL News
AOL Buys Weblogs Inc
PaidContent reports that AOL have acquired Weblogs Inc -- a company founded by Jason Calacanis which is one of the largest publishers of professional paid bloggers -- for an estimated $20 - $35 million:
This is a very quick exit: the company was founded about two years ago, and took some money from Mark Cuban a year down the line. For Calacanis, this is his second company being sold in a space of about two years...his original company Rising Tide Studios was first sold to Wicks Business Information, which in itself was bought out by Dow Jones. The company's blogs have had an exponential trajectory, with sites like Engadget, Autoblog, BloggingBaby, and others. In total, the company has about 130 bloggers, with about 15 full time employees, from what I know. AOL intends to keep the company/blogs separate from its site, much in the vein of what is happening with other blog and Web 2.0 companies being bought. But this is perhaps the first pure content-related company being bought out in the blog/ Web 2.0 space...or at least of this scale.