Access to Inventory

Here is a very simple way to think about the value of advertising on blogs.  About.com was acquired by the NY Times for $410 million at a multiple of over 10 times About's 2004 revenues and a multiple of over 30 times EBITDA.  Several analysts say there is a dearth of ad space inventory.  But of course it's more than that.  When you own or deal with a wholesale property you can work a sponsorship deal. 

Now consider blog inventory.  Unless its part of Weblogs.inc or Corante, you can't work that deal without significant transaction costs.  Like Denton's Sony deal for $25k/month.  This points to the opportunity, not only for aggregate micro-pubs -- but for a system where publishers aggregate themselves through commoditization.  How to value this inventory is another thing, however.