Blog network/ citizen journalism site Instablogs is currently negotiating a $3 million round of funding, sources familiar with the deal have told TechCrunch.

The India based Instablogs launched in October 2005 originally as a blog network. The site has changed over time to become predominantly a citizen journalism site that competes with services such as Newsvine, complete with mainstream media syndication deals.

We’ve seen a number of documents related to Instablog’s quest for funding, but as no deal has been finalized we won’t publish them in full, however some interesting stats and quotes as follows:

• Instablogs is doing 2.5+ million page views per month with 12,000 registered members
• $300,000 in revenue last year
• The company is profitable and is pitching its location as a competitve advantage cost wise

From the SWAT analysis Instablog lists its Weaknesses as a high attrition rate of writers, low CPM rates and 30% unsold inventory.

Projections:

Instablogs says that it wants to use the funding to:

Expand the business model, hire key management, technology development which includes but not limited to buying more servers and additional bandwidth, partnership and alliances with more News Agencies, to invest and retain core writers, and online and offline advertising. 


I can remember covering Instablogs the day it launched and it was a rocky start. The site had 46 mostly empty blogs and didn’t initially gain a lot of positive coverage. Today lack of content is a problem they don’t have, with a fairly well-rounded portal covering a wide variety of topic areas. The numbers are fairly impressive, and should they take funding it would further legitimize the blogging/ CitJ space as a business proposition.

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