Startup guide says that the Yahoo Publisher Network bubble is over.

9rules has some thoughts on the whole OSM, PJ Media, $3.5m in venture capital, and the $38/visitor mess. Don’t miss Mike Rundle’s comment as well – well said.

Jason has a few thoughts on the $38 / unique visitor figure:

Om… you know I love you, but this is absurd. Like really, really crazy. Weblogs, Inc. was bought by AOL because of revenue and revenue growth. Eyeballs and pageviews had nothing to do with it–zero. No one in the marketplace is buying things based on eyeballs–no one. It’s all based on revenue.

Boingboing, like any other web property, is worth 1-10x revenue and 5-30x earnings. So, if BB does 30-50k a month/360-600k a year (which seems possible to me based on the ~5m page views a month) it would be worth between 500k and $3M

And you know what.. he’s exactly right.. and I agree with him.

I’ve bought and sold my fair share of websites over the last six years.. and guess what my first question was?

What is your revenue on this site right now? And can you document that revenue?

From there, I ended up paying anywhere from 2-12 times monthly revenue, depending on the site and its genre.

Anything else might be fun to talk about.. but it’s stupid to buy a site.. or a network, based on pageviews, unique visitors, or technorati ranks…

What say you?

Darren Rowse, over at Problogger, has some additional thoughts on the Business 2.0 valuation article from earlier todya.

From Om Malik’s article in Business 2.0:

Based on recent high-profile Web content deals, the value of a unique monthly website visitor currently hovers around $38 (the average purchase price per unique user of acquisitions during the past year). As a result, those who built popular websites over the last few years look prescient: They “bought” eyeballs when the market placed little value on them — making daily blog posts or encouraging others to upload text and photos — and can now sell their traffic at a markup.

BizNicheMedia is now moderating all comments due to comment spam. Don’t blame them.

b5media has an interview up of blogger Ingrid Diaz.

Fine Fools has an update on their traffic and technorati ranks. Blog Network List will be a help for them once its ready.

Performancing has some background on Google’s PageRank.

Creative Weblogging launches network wide search & syndication abilities for other bloggers.

Shiny Media celebrates their one year anniversary.

Performancing has posted an interview with the CEO of popular ad network Chitika. Some interesting thoughts from their CEO on the success of the Chitika “eminimalls”:

The success of our eMiniMalls program can be attributed to the following factors:

1. Our innovative “impulse merchandising” based product promotions model was designed to complement, but not cannibalize, revenue from existing traditional advertisements and contextual text ads channels.

2. We recognized that at the end of the day, publishers know what works best on their sites so we decided to adopt a flexible model giving our clients the “freedom of choice” to either use the program in a) the “full-service” mode and let our targeting system automatically select the best products to promote, or b) the “self-service” mode (where our clients, i.e., publishers can choose to override the system selections and hand pick keywords/products.

3. Rather than taking a brute forced marketing and sales approach we decided to adopt an open ended “take it for a spin and let the numbers speak for themselves” approach.

4. We listened to the feedback that we received from early adopters and launched a “referral” program based on terms that work best for our affiliates.
And, no. We are not just targeting the blogs. eMiniMalls is best suited for any website where “impulse merchandising” makes sense.

Instablogs hits the turf today with several announcements, starting with this redesign of the Tattoo Blog:

Tattoos for many are not just about markings on skin and fashion. It is love, it is style, and it is art – matchless, invigorating, powerful, and sexy. Imbibed into the soul of the art of tattooing, our mission at Tattoblog is to portray skin art as a reflection of the past, present, and future. We have tried to capture the same spirit with new design too.

Instablog also announced a new cartoon series on Gamingblog called Draco’s World:

Gamingblog is introducing its brand new cartoon Draco’s World. Draco is a 14 year kid who reviews games for a local TV station. He is helped by Janice, the 25 year old TV executive. Mouse is Draco’s best friend. Both Draco and Mouse are low on social skills. Mouse digs free food above everything else.

9rules welcomes 4 new sites to their network:

Dizzy Island

Centripetal Notion

Life Coaches Blog

Louis Cars