A one man blog company sold for $15 million. So there’s living proof that you don’t need to have a huge 25 person staff to run a successful blog.

I saw this on John Chow.com, who saw it at ProBlogger who saw it at PaidContent.

Bankaholic is a one man blog company that offers information on banking deposits, savings accounts and money market accounts. The blog was bought by BankRate, a site that offers a wide variety of banking information.

If you are like me and many others out there in the tech community - you are busy busting your butt trying to come up with new ideas for web sites. Not just any web site, I mean the big ones. Like who would have thought a simple idea like StumbleUpon would be worth $75 million. But that’s what it is being sold to eBay for.

There is a good article over at TechCrunch.com. Dan Kimerling talks about the creation of ideas and how they can reshape our world. Google being a good example and Facebook as well.

If you’re in the business of developing the next big site, it’s worth your time to read this article. As Dan says, good luck and keep formulating those ideas.

There are only a few jobs that I would really want. Owning a company like Curious Office is one of them.

Curious Office is a company incubator for Web 2.0 startups. Their latest creation called Pressplan just closed $1.7 million in Series A financing. Some people in the know in the startup industry like Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, was a little surprised about it because he didn’t know exactly what it was they plan to do. And this guy seems to know everything that happens in the startup world. He writes, “I have no idea what it does but it seems like everyone who’s involved in startups in Seattle is in the know. Or at least I hope they are, because they just invested in the company.”

Curious Office has a list of six companies that they have already taken live and have actually sold. You can see a list of their founded sites on their web site. And if you are in the business of coming up with the next big site you may find this interesting. Curious Office has this to say on their web site concerning the next big application sites that will be founded:

Conceived in 2005, Curious Office was established in recognition of a new trend emerging in web development. Increasingly, small teams using emerging development frameworks, better tools and web services could deploy game changing new applications on small budgets and within extremely short periods of time. Around the same time, the term “Web 2.0? became synonymous for this evolution and for the ever increasingly popularity of user-generated content that drove all manner of new social networks built on these applications.

They go on to say that some of the big trends developing in the industry are:

1 - commodization of the core infrastructure of the technology business
2 - community powered development environments - ie open source
3 - software delivered as a service over the Internet
4 - a movement toward lightweight web services - ie web 2.0
5 - the globalization of technology development and consumption”

If you’re sitting around trying to come with the next big idea or web site, you really need to checkout Curious Office’s companies site. They have a good description of what they are looking for. If you can provide them an idea that they think is viable they could give you some seed capital of a couple hundred thousand dollars to build a proof of concept. From that stage you could then be eligible for series A funding of venture capital. It all depends on the idea and of course if you can build a proof of concept on a couple hundred thousand dollars. I know I could.

I recently saw an article that stated that Techcrunch was beginning aquisition talks with C|Net. I checked the Feedburner stats and TechCrunch has over 1,000,000 members pulling their RSS feed.

That’s a lot, especially when you think about the $1 per RSS reader per month rule. (for those that haven’t heard the rule is this. For every RSS reader you have on your site you should be pulling around $1 per user per month. That’s the average.)

Well, it’s not just Techcrunch. Techcrunch has been busy, they have multiple sites and even have their TC50 which is a small convention they have once a year to showcase new companies. Word is that Techcrunch has 1/3rd the traffice C|Net does. But 100 million is a lot.

If we take the other big sites that have been bought in the past: MySpace, YouTube, etc. you can work the math out to be between $10 and $15 per site member. What does that mean? Well, for 100 million members times $12 a member the sale price for that site could be around $1.2 billion, which is about what YouTube sold to Google for.

So with that thinking you could do similar numbers on Techcrunch to see what they are worth per member. Well, if you just take the RSS feed readers which is around:

Techcrunch Feed count

The math on that would be 1,024,000 users times $12 a user = $12,288,000. Not exactly $100 million.

Why then are they being valued at $100 million? I would venture to say that it’s probably because of the exposure they have to the tech community and the amount of traffic they generate. And we all know that with traffic you can monetize that big time and sell advertising space. So this may be a good thing for C|Net, but it would be interesting to see if they [C|Net] can keep up the momentum that Techcrunch has had over the past three years.

What can we learn from this? Hmm, maybe this: “You don’t have to have millions of users on your site to get a big sell out, just have a ton of traffic.”