Valleywag
A few weeks back, we IMterviewed Weblogs Inc. founder and Sequoia entrepreneur Jason Calacanis egarding his newest projects. When his planned venture was likened to taking on Henry Copeland at Blogads, Calacanis replied, "That's like Michael Jordan going after a 12-year old in a game of 1-on-1." (Which Jordan would totally do; he's notoriously cruel.) Copeland didn't take kindly to being likened to a 12-year-old, though.
In response to the broadside, Copeland posted a laundry list of reasons why Blogads is better than Weblogs ever was. In closing, he comes up with 10-1 odds for Jordan vs. The Kid, and wagers $10,000 of his money versus $100,000 from Calacanis that Blogads' "2006 totals for net blogger earnings" were better than Weblogs'. 1,000 to 1 odds that Calacanis will respond at all; 100,000 to 1 that he takes the bet, considering that he no longer need even get out of bed for anything as paltry as Copeland's $10,000.
Comments
Wow ownage, almost any way it turns out Copeland wins the points here, unless Jason accepts and wins!
"BlogAds earned more for bloggers than did WIN" --- of course - this cant be denied because BlogAds like google ads is feeding many more bloggers than just WIN employees.
My money is on Jason.
soft doughy white guys sure are funny. i say one-on-one down at the beach and then winner buys chicken 'n waffles at Roscoes. booooy!
It's a very silly bet... Weblogs, Inc. is a publisher with 200 or so well-paid bloggers and Blogads is an advertising rep firm that doesn't own any IP. You really can't compare them, and I can't even if I wanted to because it's not my company any more.
Now, when I was running Weblogs, Inc. it did pay out millions to bloggers each year and we reached the $10-15 a post baseline on all the blogs. So, folks got paid well... but we weren't trying to represent 1,000 blogs or anything.
If Henry really wants to get into it we should play horseshoes, Doom II, or have a Web 2.0 boxing event. For charity of course :-)
May I suggest chess boxing?
@chris m:
Better yet, put them head to head at monetizing chess boxing blogging? Talk about niche.
As I posted on my own blog, I think the matter of how Weblogs, Inc benefits bloggers as a whole is a bit more complex than a simple monetary transaction between advertiser and publisher with an agency (BlogAds in this case) in the middle. When Engadget, or Joystiq, or Cinematical, or Slashfood, or whoever links to me, I make money the day they link because more people see my ads. I keep making money for many days to come because I continue to get referral traffic from the site. I also get bumped up in the search engines on whatever the topic I posted on happened to be. And there are probably benefits that haven't occurred to me. I'm sure I'm not alone in this indirect benefit from a Weblogs, Inc link. BlogAds only makes me as much money as the inventory they are able to sell, which in my experience is something less than 5% of my annual blogging income. Replace Weblogs, Inc with Gawker in what I said and I think the argument still holds up. The reach of both blog networks have a far greater impact (and likely help Henry's bottom line) than any single ad agency because all the ad revenue is driven by eyeballs.
everyone should be happy that so much money can be made on such bad writing. (with the exception of our hosts!) this is the beauty of capitalism.
shakespeare meet monkey. monkey meet shakespeare.
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