Verisign Buys Weblogs.com for 2.3 million
This is a very interesting turn of events. Due to my unique position as being a part of the world's largest wholesale dedicated domain registrar and heading up the business development arm of the Blogware.com service, it's intriguing how these two industries meet with this move. Dave Winer provides his take here, and Verisign's take is here.
A few years ago Verisign was asked to sell off their retail arm of Network Solutions in order to keep their contract to run the .COM and .NET registries. Basically, they were asked to stay out of the retail side while they remained as the operators of the back end of the Internet. They then tried to monetize domains that expired to a chorus of objections and stopped, then went into ring tones which doesn't conflict with the Internet in general but hasn't really panned out either.
Then there were blogs, and what an attractive lucrative industry to get into, but how would you do that? Sell them? Well that is too retail… so why not leverage your expertise in the operations of running the back end of the Internet to justify the foot into running the back end of the blogosphere? Interesting strategy, and pretty justifiable on the surface although I'm not too sure whether the current players will agree like Google, Technorati, Pubsub, and Yahoo. What I can say is that they do run a great ship over there with the .com and .net registries, so we'll see what they can bring to the table from an operational perspective.
From what I can tell in their post, it looks like they will maintain the white hat that David has worn with weblogs.com to this day so that service will remain free, but based on the hints in their post they may monetize this move by providing services for the ”filtering of spam blogs” out of the ping stream.
They have a great opportunity to prove something here and hopefully how to monetize the back end of the blogosphere will not be the only thing
