Tristian Louis on the Value of a Link

He's done the math (and the end of his post quoted below totally made me laugh):

Data for the rest of us?

In acquiring Weblogs Inc., AOL has now provided us with some numbers traditional media are willing to pay for a blog. Looking at the numbers above, one can try to guess at the value of a link from an external site. a single link on the weblogsinc network represents 0.002258559942180087 percent of the overall network.

At the different rumored price points from AOL, it looks as follows:

Link	$25 million value	30 million value	40 million value
1	$564.64	$677.57	$903.42

I don't know if those values are based on any real rationale but it's nice to dream up the value of one's blog based on this.

Should we now assume that traditional media companies are willing to pay between $500 and $1000 per site that links into a blog?

Not quite. The incremental value is in the size of the network and the underlying tools. Jason and Brian have been working on developing a blog authoring technology, called BlogSmith, that sits at the core of their network and one has to believe that AOL saw some value in the software too. However, one can easily say that blog valuations are going to be easier to make after this deal since it provides the first yardstick in that space.

Read the rest.. it's quite clever. You can't characterize the size of the network based on in-bound link counts, in part because there are at least 25 other digital social gestures that matter, 10 or so that we can currently count, and yet hardly any of the services are counting them and in part because just counting links doesn't mean very much. There are many other factors in terms of quality of each gesture. But still, I think Tristan has made a very funny post and you should check it out! A for effort and humor!

Posted by Mary Hodder at October 7, 2005 08:08 AM | TrackBack