People who think that the startup climate in Canada might need some help, well I think this announcement should suggest otherwise:

Today we are announcing that we have taken an initial round of financing to expand StartupNorth, launch new startup focused projects and to further expand our blog-related publishing business. Most of you are aware of our first addition to the SUN network: wirelessnorth.ca Source: StartupNorth » Blog Archive » We are funded! StartupNorth takes a $3.2 million series A financing

Congrats to Jevon and David.  Now, given the hints that they’ve purchased some blog networks and have cool things in the works…I’m expecting some good scoops.

Come on you can’t just promote on your blog!

Update: Ha, ha joke’s on me I guess.  Man I hate April 1st.  Note new picture.  I though it fitting ;).

Photo by Tris Hussey

So the Top 25 most valuable blogs, eh?  Hmm ….

There is no way to accurately put a value on blogs and blogging companies. All are privately-held and, as is true with many content businesses, the value of the company is based on what a buyer will pay. The figures we have put together look at advertising revenue and income from related businesses like conferences. We have not included blogs affiliated with larger media companies. It is too difficult to break-out what their traffic may be and how their income is divided with the parent. Some blogs are fronts for other businesses like O’Reilly Radar Those have been left out. A lot of big blogs do not make the list because they bring in very little commercial revenue. Treehugger probably falls into that category.

We looked at unique visitor and page view measurement services when possible: Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast. These services are often criticized for estimating website traffic too low. We have tried to take that into account. We also looked at data at blogs which gave their own ad rates and page views.  Our estimated page CPMs are based on quality of ads and number of ads on each page.  We looked at margins based on headcount and our opinion of how may of the people are full-time. Current growth rate based on our measurement sources was also taken into account. A site with traffic doubling year-over-year was give a higher multiple than one with flat traffic. Because not all blogs make money, we looked at multiples of operating income and revenue. These are completely estimates because of the tiny number of blogs which have been sold and lack of information about what the multiples may have been. Source: 24/7 Wall St.: The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs

Reading through the list I noticed that b5media wasn’t on the list.  Hmm, over 200 bloggers and 350 blogs I think we should rate up there–way up there.  Of course we can’t talk about exactly how much we’re worth, but this is what Jeremy said in his twitter stream today:

jeremywright @tdhedengren - by revenue/traffic/etc we’d be mid-list somewhere. Won’t give you a specific place though, lest I give away secrets!

jeremywright @tdhedengren - how’s this: above gigaom, below techcrunch ;-)

That puts us between $8.4  - $36 million.  Regardless, the issue is, pure and simple, that if you look at just the b5media homepage we’re pretty small, but there is Problogger, Copyblogger, and Digital Photography School … see b5media is huge but unlike many of our competitors we don’t have one or two huge blogs, we have 350.  Blogs on pretty much every niche you can imagine … and we’re growing too.

So, I guess we’ll just keep growing in the shadows … until we buy Techcrunch of course ;).