Huffington Post Sold (The Future of the Legal Blogosphere and How Much Is Your Blog Worth?)

When I heard this morning that the Huffington Post was sold for $315 million to AOL, it made me wonder once again just how much a blog was “worth” if it was sold on the open market. I speculated on this once before, on April Fool’s Day 2009, when I put my blog up for sale on eBay for $1 million.

So, with a bit of number crunching, we get this: Huffington has 25 million visitors per month as per a NYT article I read this morning. Whether that is unique visitors, or some other way of calculating visitors, I don’t know. But my little corner of cyberspace had these metrics last year: 172K visitors, 207K visits, and 295K page views (using Google Analytics). That makes this a modestly successful law blog, if one is concerned with eyeballs (as per Alexa/Avvo, #46 if counting eyeballs). Roughly speaking, it seems that Huffington gets about 1,500 times as many visitors as I do.

So if Huffington has 1,500 times as many visitors, then this blog would have a value of about $200,000.

Of course, the ability to generate revenue would be a major issue for the blog. I’ve never gone out of my way to do that, with the exception of the ALM ad you see to the right that I discussed some time ago, but it seems that law blogs would have particularly favorable demographics for advertisers. Not just books, and legal support services, but high end products such as cars as well. So one would think that a premium would be paid for such sites (if they were for sale).

Some time ago, I speculated that a group law blog in the fashion of Huffington would work very well for the right entrepreneur, leading me to write The Future of the Legal Blogosphere in 2009. (See also a 2 minute interview I did at Legal Tech in 2009 on this.) And the sale of Huffington today reinforces that feeling.