Jason Calacanis seems to have done it again. First he launched a successful blog network and sold it to AOL for an undisclosed sum. His latest venture includes couple of Finance Blogs devoted exclusively to popular stocks. Excellent idea - it will not only bring more advertising revenue for AOL but also provide them a backdoor entry into the Google Finance portal. Read details.
AOL Money & Finance together with Weblogs Inc network have launched new blogs focussed on the most popular American stocks including Apple AAPL, eBay EBAY, GE, Google GOOG, Microsoft MSFT, Time Warner TWX, Wal-Mart WMT and Yahoo YHOO. The blogs are tightly integrated with the AOL Finance website pulling live Stock quotes and market information. The key difference is that WeblogsInc bloggers would be writing for Blogging Stocks and not AOL staffers.
Finance blogs and websites get some of the highest paying advertisements because finance websites are less frequented by techno-savvy geeks and more by elderly and affluent people who are genuinely interested in information. Jason is probably right in thinking that Blogging Stocks could soon become one of the most profitable blogs on their network. In addition to Google Ads, they have already got hold of Zacks Investement Research to sponsor all their sites.
Google finance has a section for Blogs on every stock page. If your blog post mentions the stock symbol (like GOOG for Google), you are highly likely to be included in the blog section for that stock. Again, if there are many posts, Google sorts them by relevance.
Now Blogging Stocks URLs and categories - both have the stock symbols. Looking at the buzz these blogs have created during the initial launch day, they are likely to get very popular soon and move up the relevance ladder. So there some writes a post on Apple Computer on Blogging Stocks and here it appear on APPL Google Finance page. Nice one.
There are clear indications that Blogging Stocks would be expanded very soon. The individual sites for stocks like Pfizer, Amazon, Home Depot, Coke, Pepsi, Intel, Ford, GM, DiamlerChrysler, Motorola, XM, Siriums are already in place and AOL may launch them very soon.
Jason, the concept is great but can we have a different color theme. Looks like some GreenPeace activists in web design team.