Don Dodge writes an interesting post on the $10 million purchase of MyBlogLog by Yahoo, where he lays out various valuation methodologies - including valuation per employee, per subscriber, and so on.
I don’t know how much revenue MyBlogLog has to date. It’s not zero, but I wouldn’t guess that it’s huge either. I actually subscribe to their $25 premium service to report analytics on my two blogs - this one, and the Zenrob archive blog. Yes, I know you can get free analytics services, but I’m a huge fan of MyBlogLog, and I like the reporting and analytics capabilities of their pro service.
That being said, I’m not sure what percentage of their users pay for premium services. MyBlogLog hit 40k sites in December 2006, with close to 10% of their sites deploying the reader roll widget. So every 1% of their sites that they can upsell to the $25 annual premium service is equivalent to $10,000 annual revenue. So - it’s likely not enough revenue to make valuation metrics meaningful.
What would be interesting would be trying to value MyBlogLog from the perspective of a traffic generator.
I calculated earlier that MyBlogLog accounts for 6 percent of my unique visitors. Andy Beard also ran this analysis on his traffic and found that MyBlogLog accounts for 8% of his unique visitors, compared to 26% from Google searches and 4% from Technorati.
Is there value in directing traffic from blog to blog? And what would be the business model to monetizing that traffic? We all know Google’s paid search model works wonders, but can that be applied to the MyBlogLog social network? It’s not like one uses MyBlogLog to search for mortgages and submit mortgage leads, so it seems to be a little different from the straight direct response model that motivates keyword buys.
Check out Erick Shonfeld’s post on StumbleUpon for a description of a business model that monetizes a person who is more of a serendipitous browser of the Internet, rather than a searcher who is typing in keywords in search engines to find stuff.
3 responses so far ↓
Andy Beard // Jan 15, 2007 at 4:23 am
One of the great things about MyBlogLog is the repeat traffic and community aspects.
I am sure my most avid readers came from the MyBlogLog community.
I made some comments regarding the potential of MBL over on Nick Wilson’s blog that they might appreciate
http://communicontent.com/mybloglog-now-i-get-it#comment
Squasher98 // Jan 15, 2007 at 8:12 am
I think the acquisition had more to do with potential convergence possibilities than from advertising (traffic) potential..I suggested in an entry that the idea of “presence” could be applied to other media varieties (tv, etc). Scott from MBL chimed in with some great thoughts: (http://www.leveragingideas.com/?p=146). Either way I think Yahoo got a great deal.
candice // Jan 20, 2007 at 4:36 am
A few more numbers from mybloglog:
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/01/mybloglog_shoes.html
They did have a little bit of subscriber revenue, apparently.
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