Weblogs, Inc.

• 1. Introduction

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  Weblogs, Inc. was born in September 2003 with a phone call, a handshake, and the backing of Mark Cuban. Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey founded the company in the wake of Calacanis's Silicon Alley Reporter magazine, and within a year they had built something that had never quite existed before: a networked empire of blogs covering everything from gadgets to cars to celebrity gossip. At its peak, the network ran as many as 90 blogs. Most of the traffic flowed through a handful of breakout titles, but the sheer breadth of the enterprise was its calling card. How did two entrepreneurs turn a collection of subdomains into a $25 million sale to AOL? And what happened to all those blogs after the deal closed?

• 2. Building the Network

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  By early 2004, Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker Media were the two clearest models for what a blog empire could look like. Most of the early Weblogs, Inc. blogs lived as subdomains of weblogsinc.com, a scrappy, unified address that kept the whole operation under one roof. The exception was Engadget, a stand-alone site launched in March 2004 to cover new technology. Engadget was co-founded by Peter Rojas, who had previously served as editor of Gizmodo inside the rival Gawker Media network. That origin made Engadget something of a competitive prize from the start. Over time, Weblogs, Inc. grew beyond the subdomain model into a sprawl of 26 stand-alone sites and more than 50 sub-blogs. A few of the company's principals, including Mark Cuban, kept personal blogs on the network as well. Popular titles came to include Autoblog, TUAW, Joystiq, Luxist, Slashfood, Cinematical, TV Squad, Download Squad, Blogging Baby, Gadling, AdJab, and Blogging Stocks.

• 3. The AOL Sale

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  In October 2005, AOL paid a reported $25 million for Weblogs, Inc. The timing was deliberate: AOL was then preparing to become an independent division within Time Warner, and a portfolio of lively blog brands gave it a foothold in the emerging world of digital media. For years after the acquisition, Weblogs, Inc. continued to operate separately from AOL's other web properties. The Weblogs Inc branding lingered subtly alongside AOL's on titles like Engadget and Autoblog until late 2010, when the name was quietly dropped and the official website was redirected to AOL.com. That change roughly coincided with a major redesign of AOL-branded properties. Around the same time, AOL also acquired TechCrunch, the tech industry blog, at a moment when it had fewer than a dozen remaining blog brands under the old Weblogs, Inc. umbrella.

• 4. The Huffington Post Era

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  In February 2011, AOL acquired The Huffington Post for $315 million, and the ripple effects reached every former Weblogs, Inc. blog. The former network's titles, along with TechCrunch and much of AOL's other publishing operation, were folded into a new internal structure called the Huffington Post Media Group. The Huffington Post editorial team took over editorial oversight of AOL's blogs and news sites. The arrangement generated friction almost immediately. Among the most prominent casualties was Michael Arrington, the founder and editor of TechCrunch, who departed amid controversy over editorial direction. Months after the Huffington Post deal closed, AOL further tightened its portfolio to just 20 content brands. Of those, only Engadget, Autoblog, Joystiq, and TUAW survived as former Weblogs, Inc. titles.

• 5. Closures and Survivors

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  the 3rd of February 2015, was the date Joystiq and TUAW were both shut down and folded into Engadget. Around the same time, AOL Autos and AOL Tech were closed and redirected to Autoblog and Engadget, respectively, consolidating what remained of the blog era into two flagship destinations. TUAW's archives were republished on Engadget, though the original brand's fate took an unexpected turn: in mid-2024, TUAW was revived under ownership of Web Orange Limited, a Hong Kong-based advertising services company that acquired the brand without its original content. The relaunched site published articles that were AI-generated, including summaries of old posts from the original TUAW staff, often with incorrect author attributions and AI-generated images placed alongside bylines. TV Squad had a similarly winding path, merging with AOL TV in May 2011 and then shifting to HuffPost TV just seven months later. Hack a Day, notably, was never included in the original AOL sale. It operated as a separate entity until SupplyFrame acquired it in 2013.

• 6. Verizon and Apollo

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  AOL's spin-off from Time Warner came in 2009, and the branding emphasis on AOL's own identity increased as a result. Six years later, in 2015, AOL was acquired by Verizon. Then in 2017, Verizon combined AOL's content business with that of Yahoo!, which it had also acquired, into a single online media subsidiary. Verizon eventually sold that combined entity to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Through every ownership change, Engadget and Autoblog kept publishing. Autoblog itself changed hands again in September 2024, when staff were let go and The Arena Group purchased the site, bringing in an entirely new group of writers. The Autoblog staff's final Editor-in-Chief had been Greg Migliore; its last General Manager was Adam Morath.