Om is really smart, but this is absurd. Like really, really crazy.

Weblogs, Inc. was bought by AOL because of revenue and revenue growth. Eyeballs and pageviews had nothing to do with it--zero.

No one in the marketplace is buying things based on eyeballs--no one. It's all based on revenue.

Boingboing, like any other web property, is worth 1-10x revenue and 5-30x earnings. So, if BB does 30-50k a month/360-600k a year (which seems possible to me based on the 5m page views a month) it would be worth between 500k and $3M (based on revenue since with five mouths and server hosting to pay for it doesn't really have earnings--yet!).

Paying much more than that amount wouldn't make much sense unless you were an affinity buyer or buying the talent (which is all part time and spoken for on other projects anyway). You would be much better off putting the $3M to work on hiring a staff of 10 writers @ $100k, putting 1M towards a management team, and $1M towards marketing.

That's how these deals tend to go down.. people look at the cost of buying vs. building and the numbers Om puts out are so absurd it's laughable.