why bloggers should wear big blingd watches.

think big
Originally uploaded by benbarren

I'm liking these Graham watches, specifically the black (or fluoro yellow) Swordfish model. With watches, big is better. Old skool ones like Rolex are just too small, with a face diameter of only 40mm. The bigger is better new watches like Hublot Big Bang, The Graham (and the Jaeger LeCoultre Master Compressor Diving Pro) are 46mm+ : Might not sound alot but it makes all the difference. Just as with watches, bigger is better when it comes to blogs according to Mr Arrington, who's in fine form here :

"Someone needs to pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET crushing $200 million/year in revenue business. It can happen. In fact it’s almost certainly going to happen. But if you bloggers go out there and raise $3 -$5 million on say a $10 million valuation, you’ve just priced yourself out of the rollup. That option will be closed to you, and you’ll be stuck out in the cold, taking life support payments from Federated Media or another ad network, and having a generally awful time running your business."

Surely the vehicle for the rollup would be TechCrunch, and it would buy the blogs for pieces of equity and spending money. I've been surprised its only taken an organic approach to date, but with such stellar organic :) What I wonder would this network be tech ala Cnet 2.0 or would it have more than a party with the popsugar types and be the Conde Nast of the blogsphere.

Luckily Henry Blodget is into the deal/can see the vision : "So let us know where/when we can grab a beer and refine this dream-team world domination plan. In the meantime, we'll continue to raise our $2-$3 million or $3-$5 million or whatever, set our sky-high valiuation benchmark, and explore our (many!) other strategic alternatives."

A midpoint of the Kill-Cnet vs merge with Popsugar would be to find some blogs in the porfolio.com demo of business exec meets lifestyle world and pick off those high advertiser attractive verticals/product placement : the one that rupert wants the Wall Street Journal to tap into.. (as the Weekend Financial Review does here..with its luxury travel liftouts and $10k graham watches:) Heck maybe rupert could buy the whole lot at the end of the day, or even son lachlan, who is travelling the world at the moment shoring up his multi-billion private equity deal to buy (australian) consolidated media as his previous PE partner fell through..