I’m sure you’ve heard the news by now - that Arseblog.com has joined OleOle.com.

Ok, so it’s not exactly headline news, what with the credit crunch, the gasoline prices, the fluctuating currency markets, the China earthquake and the fact that your girlfriend left you, but on a football blogging level (and trust me on this one), this is significant.

Not because Arseblog was one of the biggest (if not the biggest) independent football blog around. Not because the man sold out, or because he’s one of the lucky few who can now earn a full-time living writing (and doing other blogging-related stuff) about what he loves.

It’s significant because it’s the first step in organised blog aggregation. Welcome to the world of football blog networks.

But they’ve been around, you say. Of course. BlogFC, which AM started in 2003, was intended to be a football blog network. Real Life News had the same idea. The Offside follows the same principles, even if they’ve aggregated the blogs on a single domain instead of multiple stand-alone blogs. Even Football Media started out as a blog network (it’s changed, but that’s for later).

So OleOle.com buying up established blogs (Arseblog isn’t the only one they’ve gone after, and from what I hear they’re paying top dollar as well) is not new in the sense that it hasn’t been done before. It’s new in the sense that:

A) They’re buying / buying the blogger off instead of building - the opposite of the bootstrapper approach used by Pies and The Offside.

B) They’re paying big bucks - big, big bucks - to the blogger(s).

The money involved is interesting, because off the bat, to bring in Arseblog into the network, OleOle would have had to offer him more than he was currently making on his own through the site as a salary to even get his attention. On top of that there’s the point of handing over the accumulated value of the site itself (the audience, the search rankings, the content, the brand, etc). I’m not sure yet how they’ve gone about doing that but if the numbers they’re offering as salaries are anything to go buy, I figure one of two things is happening:

1) They’re buying up the blog cheaply.

2) They’re not buying, it’s just a partnership between the blogger and OleOle.

#2 is what I got from Arseblogger’s original announcement (if you guys know any different then please correct me). It seems logical considering that the salary they’re offering, but it would be an absolute travesty if Arseblogger sold off his blog and didn’t get 6 figures for it (at a minimum).

So where am I going with this?

The OleOle model makes sense to the extent that they are investing shrewdly in strong bloggers and strong communities. They have the financial resources to take a hit in the beginning, which gives them considerable leverage and allows them to make attractive propositions to bloggers. By offering a salary they’ve eliminated the single biggest problem blog network owners have - how to attract blogs and bloggers.

It’ll be interesting to see how they plan to break even / profit from this situation. The knock-on traffic from Arseblog and other blogs towards OleOle.com isn’t going to increase to the extent that they can cover the salaries. and they haven’t really slapped 10 different ads across Arseblog (and I doubt any blogger will agree to that approach). So what’s their angle - sign-ups to their network, monetization through advertising or creating an awesome blog network that they can later sell off?

Should be fun to see how this unfolds. Almost as fun as figuring out who’s going to be next.

One thing is for sure - in the coming year(s) we’re going to see a lot of money being invested in this space as people try different ways of gaining access to niche audiences - as blogs and communities become more developed, the competition for access to them (especially unrestricted access, such as OleOle.com now has to the biggest Arsenal community online) will start to heat up.