WELL, THIS SUCKS:

The wizardry of contextual advertising and blog publishing platforms will allow internet publications to flourish in a thousand niches. Well, that was the theory. The practice? AOL is closing down a slew of smaller blogs it bought from entrepreneur-provocateur and Valleywag staple, Jason Calacanis, in 2005. The bulk of AOL’s ad revenues from its blog network, running at more than $1m a month according to Calacanis, come from a few star brands such as Engadget, Autoblog and Joystiq. They’re in traditional broad categories: consumer electronics, autos and video games. The Time Warner internet unit has told editors of smaller and unprofitable sites that they will be shuttered at the end of the month. So far, we’re hearing lesser-known titles such as BBHub, Divester, DV Guru and PVR Wire; do let us know about others, so we can establish a count.

I like Divester, and I’ve linked to it a number of times. On the other hand, it seemed to mostly push dive gadgets — it’s always seemed to me that there’s more dive-niche money in travel ads.