When Weblogs Inc closes down a blog on a specific topic, you know something’s going pear-shaped in that particular field.

WIN has announced that its Digital Photography blog has been “retired”, though apparently not yet placed in its home for golden agers.

We too have had trouble finding effective authors for our Digital Camera Latest site, which will continue on a shared arrangement after Labor Day in the States.

By contrast, Darren Rowse’s prolific Digital Photography School continues to make waves, even meriting an article in the Wall Street Journal. What are we to make of this?

Coincidentally, it’s on Darren’s Problogger site that Jason Calacanis explains the move in the comments on the post: “Even the Big Boys Call it Quits”.

WIN is consolidating its blogs because :

a) the big ones are sold out on advertising and need more inventory
b) the small ones are having a hard time becoming money makers for us because advertisers want blogs with > 1M pages a month.

They want to focus on the big winners that advertisers can’t get enough of — not just Engadget, but also Autoblog and others, those in the range 500k to 3m pages a month. The aim is get them to 5m pages/month when they will start to mop up a lot of incoming deals that have no place to go at present.

“Bottom line: we are in phase two at WIN, and phase two is about scale. We knnow we can make money, the question is can we scale this business to a LOT of money. Like move the needle at AOL money–and we’re on the way.”

If these numbers seem out of reach of smaller operators that’s because WIN is now part of AOL and draws traffic from a global media conglomerate. I don’t think those of us who have yet to achieve that massive advantage should throw in the towel in despair.

But despite the different league these stats come from, there’s a lot of good sense in the principles used. Consolidation is a good way to add strength cheaply to promising mid-range blogs.

Where acquisitions will cost you money, consolidation can save you money while at the same time boosting mid-performers into that magic >1m PVs range which expands your saleable inventory to a different kind of advertiser.

Here at Syntagma, in our tenth month of operation, we’re growing our page views at around 300pc a year, and that rate is accelerating. We’re happy with that — few businesses get that kind of growth. But Jason’s words on consolidation will be top of the agenda next time we consider the road ahead.