A Personal Blog
Weblogs, Inc, Sold
According to Slashdot, it got more than 20 million dollars.
This isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that WIN took this deal. I was under the distinct impression Jason was holding out for significantly more than this.
Congrats to WIN.
My fear is that this will change the blogosphere’s perception of Jason and WIN. Before they were the champions of bloggers, showing off how it could be done. Now, they are AOL Employees. And AOL’s ability to maintain a solid business is in doubt across the board.
Congrats to the guys at WIN, the bloggers and everyone for doing a great job, building a kickass network and getting a decent payoff to boot.
But, please, please, please, remain bloggers first and foremost.
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| Print article | This entry was posted by Jeremy Wright on October 6, 2005 at 11:51 am, and is filed under Blogging. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |
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about 6 years ago
Yes, but look at the contract, Jeremy. Problogger and Blogebrity have got bullet-point versions of it. The item that catches my eye is : “Bloggers will have ownership of their content offline”. This is real sanity as it means they can use the subsidiary rights to publish books etc which will bring added prestige to the network. But it won’t detract from the network’s right to retain the content online and receive the income in perpetuity. It’s a win-win situation.
I believe b5 would benefit from this. If the bloggers retained copyright, and granted b5 the World Website Rights, the network would have all it needed, and bloggers would not be selling their souls needlessly. Big name writers wouldn’t be put off joining the network because of restrictive practices on the subsidiary rights.
Maybe AOL has something to teach us here. :-)
about 6 years ago
John, Darren and I talked about that point immediately after he wrote it. It’s a solid one, and one we’re likely to incorporate in some way :)
about 6 years ago
Jeremy, can you explain what the difference is between bloggers and AOL blog employees?
about 6 years ago
Anthony, my fear is that whenever anyone at WIN talks, it could be seen as coming from an “AOL perspective” (like when companies get bought by Microsoft) then from WIN themselves, or the individuals as bloggers.
about 6 years ago
I wouldn’t consider “offline rights” a big deal, especially when adding all those posts up still wouldn’t make a decent chapter in any book. It’s more like AOL has no use for that stuff other than online.
about 6 years ago
Depends on the blogger, Scrivs. Look at Chris Anderson at The Long Tail. He’s blogging a book. If you don’t own the content you tend to produce snippets. If you do, you may want to make it into something else, or at least the outline of something else.
about 6 years ago
Fair enough that makes sense.
about 6 years ago
I don’t know enough about the whole blog networking thing to have a deep insight, I just like the fact that it legitimizes the whole thing even more.
about 6 years ago
I’ve just started (at the same time by co-incidence) a tech blog network based on the weblogsinc model. http://grepblogs.com/about/
me: steve.osdir.com
-Steve