As AOL continues improving its service portfolio, the company has recently announced the acquisition of Weblogs Inc, a blog network that contains 85 blogs, the most known being Engadget, Autoblog, Cinematical and TVSquad.
Jason Calacanis, the founder of Weblogs, has chosen niche domains and, because of that, his services have become specialized, and generate more than 30 million hits per month. Aside from these, the information provided via RSS feeds generates an extra 25 million hits.
According
to Paidcontent.org, the first site informed about the acquisition, Calacanis also contacted News Corporation (which have recently acquired the IGN network for $300 million), Yahoo (which has recently taken over Upcoming.org), and MSN (which was rumored to purchase AOL).
Seems that in the end AOL was the only interested in the offer, and the transaction was completed for an undisclosed amount of money. The blogs' content will be integrated into AOL.com and other AOL sites: Personal Finance Channel, Autos Channel, Travel Channel, Games Channel, Television Channel and AOL News.
AOL considers that by using these blogs, they will also be able to quickly generate new sites for their users.
Blogging continues to be an interesting phenomenon for companies in the online services business. Google plans to launch in the next two weeks a search engine specifically targeted at blogs. Yahoo also intends to merge Yahoo 360 (the portal's blog service) with its latest acquisition, Upcoming.org.
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