In my opinion, he made over 2 million dollars because he owned the name weblogs.com, which Verisign bought for 2.3 million.

I don't think it has anything to do with his weblog. It has to do with the success of Blogger, and after that, blogging in general. If I had never maintained a blog, but owned the name weblogs.com, I would be 2.3 million dollars richer right now too. I seriously doubt that Verisign wanted weblogs.com because of their pingback system, seeing that it was becoming less and less relevant as Technorati and other similar sites grew.

But I do agree with his main point that his blog made money, and Dan Lyons is wrong.

He did not simply "own the name weblogs.com". Weblogs.com was the first service that could be pinged to say your weblog has been updated, which he implemented first in his company's environment, then in PHP (IIRC). It then showed a list of all updated weblogs. This worked pretty well before the spammers showed up.

It wasn't just a name sell, it was a service sell.

(That may not sound like a very difficult service, but there were scaling issues as time went on. And... at the time that it sold, $2 million wasn't much money, either.)

I already addressed your point in my original comment.

I believe that Verisign bought weblogs.com mainly because they wanted the name, not because of the service. The site was already losing traffic and becoming irrelevant when he sold it, due to the increasing number of much more useful related services such as Technorati. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Technorati had a valuation of over 12 million dollars one year before Verisign bought weblogs.com for 2.3 million.

Yes, I admit I missed that last sentence.

However, I think your contention that they didn't want the service is wrong, since they are still running it. Swing on over to http://www.weblogs.com and see for yourself.

You may think it was a dumb decision on their part. (I do. Weblogs.com did its thing back when the weblog world numbered in the hundreds or few thousands, but even pre-Twitter it was pretty obviously increasingly worthless at the time it was sold. Even if the tech side scaled, the social side did not.) But clearly they did want it, and still do want it enough to continue running it. (Though I wouldn't be surprised it gets shut down any day now...)

Who established the term "weblog" as the standard term for that kind of website? The term "weblog" had to be the expected name for the phenomenon before the domain name weblogs.com would have much value. Does anyone own the domain name onlinediary.com or linkcommentary.com or some other possible descriptive name for what we call a weblog?

I think Jorn Barger coined the term "weblog", it entered widespread usage quickly, and Dave Winer registered weblogs.com after that.

I made $2 million from a typewriter! All I had to do was use it to write a best selling novel and pitch it to the right publisher!

While he might be correct by saying he made it "with this blog," that entirely misses the point.

Since that is his point, I daresay you missed it.

"Blogs don't make money. But people with blogs can."

He probably would have made as much money even if he didn't blog about himself.

The point I got from this post was that you shouldn't expect to make money from a blog itself. Blogging can be a form of marketing for your real business, but if your business is "pure-play" blogging you are probably in trouble.

The more appropriate parallel would be "I made $2 million with a book".

I wonder what Dan Lyons was thinking with his initial column. He's obviously a smart guy. He knows the blog landed him a book deal, his new job at Newsweek, and internet notoriety. He knows there is money to be made through and around blogging, so I'm inclined to think it was an intentional publicity bait, which is working amazingly well.

Otherwise, I am constantly amazed by how dense people are about the value of internet traffic. Like just having a ton of visits is the only thing the matters. Visitor intent is just as powerful a factor in the equation.

I call anecdotal evidence. Not everyone can have one of the first blogs on the web and be in the top 100 most trafficked blogs. Also, attributing the success of a startup on a blog is a bit of a stretch.

Everyone CAN start a blog and use it to market their business. If that is the only marketing channel, attributing the success of the business to it is not that big of a stretch.

Let's be clear: Anyone who has a domain name like weblogs.com to sell, even with zero content, is going to make quite a bit of money. They are scarce commodities, and that has nothing to do with blogging. I hardly see how it's fair to include that in the total. If I registered movies.com years ago, and had a blog about movies today, it would be a bit silly to attribute the millions I would get from selling movies.com to my blog.

If you want to learn about a real blogger making actual money from his blog (and not related software/consulting sales), head on over to JohnChow.com.

He turned a few front page Digg stories into a blogging success story and clears a healthy 6 figures each year now.

John Chow's blog is such a joke. It exists to scam newbies. Shouldn't you be busy making money online?

How does he scam newbies? By offering advice in how to make money with their own blog/site? How is that different than the "do as we do" blog posts from 37 Signals?

Oh and I am, thanks.

John Chow has you fooled. He has never contributed anything worthwhile. You need to stop thinking about the dollar signs and actually analyze what he writes about - absolutely nothing. He's actually a joke in the blogging community, and so are his followers.

If JC is a joke in the 'blogging community', sign me up. Maybe the people who follow his advice blindly are fools, but the lessons I've learned from JC are very worthwhile.

You take what is valuable, and leave the rest. I'm far from a daily JC visitor, but I check in from time to time in order to gain new lessons on self-promotion, marketing and creative ways to bring in money that is otherwise left on the table. All things that are important to a startup founder/hacker.

Jasan Calacanis is probably the biggest whore/self-promoter out there, and while many may laugh at him, it's worked out pretty well for him so far.

Steve Pavlina, Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak - there are some.