• by Shankar Gupta , April 28, 2006

AOL's blogging unit, Weblogs Inc., Thursday launched a set of blogs focusing on stocks, including publicly held companies in the media and technology space, such as Google, Yahoo Time Warner, Microsoft, Wal-Mart and Apple.

Marty Moe, general manager of AOL Money and Finance, said AOL decided to expand with financial blogs because the topic appeared to be relatively undercovered. "The financing blogging space, while coming along, was not nearly as developed news blogging or entertainment blogging," he said. "Most of the blogs out there are either sector or industry blogs, or blogs of individuals who are telling people about what they think about financial topics."

Bloggingstocks.com has AOL branding, and is under the AOL Money and Finance division, with a link to Bloggingstocks content from the Money and Finance home page; the blogs mark the first time Weblogs Inc. has developed blogs specifically for the AOL network since AOL purchased Weblogs last year for an estimated $25 million.

For the initiative, AOL and Weblogs, Inc. collected a staff of journalists, industry experts, and independent investors to author single-stock-focused blogs. "Individual investors are the most passionate about individual stocks, and the further you get away from individual companies, the more the passion gets diluted," Moe said. "What we want to do is become the place for any holder of these stocks--the place where they go there every day and know they're going to get something they're not going to get anywhere else."

The network consists of eight blogs to start, all hosted at Bloggingstocks.com. They will be monetized by standard Weblogs, Inc. display ads and text links. The network will be adding two to three new stock blogs a month, Moe said, until "the user interest is exhausted."

Moe said that this blogging network aims to target a large segment of the finance space, since most of the consumer interest centers around big-name stocks. "We knew as we approached this that overwhelming amount of usage online centers around a number of widely held stocks," he said. "We knew that by focusing on a relatively limited universe of stocks, we would actually be able to address a large majority of the addressable marketplace."