Ghost Sites of the Web

Web 1.0 history, forgotten web celebrities, old web sites, commentary, and news by Steve Baldwin. Published erratically since 1996.

July 25, 2008

Three AOL Blogs Living on Borrowed Time

AOL has put the cabash on three Blogs that have failed to meet expectations: DiyLife.com, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and DownloadSquad, according to an internal memo posted on PaidContent.org. These properties were inherited from AOL's acquisition of WebLogs Inc, a property put together a few years ago by noted Silicon Alley bad boy Jason McCabe Calacanis for about $25 million. In my book, Calacanis is second only to Mark Cuban in being able to talk fat-walleted corporations out of millions for Web properties with dubious futures (Cuban got more than a billion from Yahoo.com for Broadcast.com, which Yahoo doesn't even use anymore).

Anyway, in the interest of historical preservation, here are screen shots form these three doomed Blogs. It seems that a major factor that doomed them was their pay-per-post model, which clearly made them a cost center in AOL's dwindling (some might say hemorrhaging) online empire. Thanks to ValleyWag.com for surfacing this sad story.

DiyLife.com was killed by the bean counters at AOL

The Unofficial Apple Weblog fell victim to its pay-per-post economics


DownloadSquad.com is another casualty of AOL's austerity measures

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