His strongest skills are hype &#38; public relations.<p>AOL was mainly buying into the trend of blogging / lower cost content production models when they bought Weblogs, Inc. They didn't buy a huge cash generating company.<p>Jason was bragging about having about a million a year in revenues (revenues, not profits) with some absurdly large number of writers (like 30). And part of that cash flow was selling text links that flow PageRank to online casinos...over 100 of them carpet-bombed his network of blogs.
<a href="http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312" rel="nofollow">http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312</a><p>And (ironically) back then he was also selling links to scraper sites
<a href="http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5295" rel="nofollow">http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5295</a>
(maybe that is where the Mahalo idea came from)?