AOL's Blog King

I work for a big company, but they don't tell me what to do or what to blog. I say to my bloggers that the day [AOL] tells me what to do is the day I leave, and the day I tell you what to blog should be the day you leave. I don't think I'm The Man at all. And I think we've changed the culture of AOL a little bit. I think you're going to see AOL become a very transparent company.

Do your bloggers get health care?

Not yet. Most of our people are not doing this for a living. They were doing this for the passion, they were doing it for free on their own personal blogs. The fact that we started paying them, they started making a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars a month from us, is incredible.

You've been through a boom and a bust. Are we in another bubble now?

It's frothy. And I'll tell you the thing that makes me nervous. When I hear entrepreneurs talk about how many more pages they have than another group, or how many more connections per user they have in their social network, that's when I realize that they don't have that strength to go farther. The scoreboard for me is always earnings. When I see people basing the scoreboard on something else, I realize that they're not real entrepreneurs.

You've gotten a lot of criticism during your career for your unabashed hustle. Does this huge deal vindicate you?