Four hundred financial blogs. Who knew there were so many? Perhaps they have come of age now, at least as commercial entities. According to The Wall Street Journal, "Forbes Inc., was set to announce Monday that it will start selling ads this spring for about 400 financial blogs."

It is an open question as to whether Forbes can make money. Some of the larger blogs in the network are still tiny. Take Xconomy, one of the blogs Forbes is pitching. According to measurement service Compete, only a little over 18,000 people visited the site last month. Another site in the network, Talking Biz News, is too small to be measured by Compete or Alexa, another audience measurement firm.

If Forbes can pull together 400 sites with 5,000 visitors a month, however, it can have a network with two million visitors. And that's a lot.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Reuters (NASDAQ:RTRSY) has a blog section at the bottom of most business stories at Reuters.com. It is called Business Blog Posts, and it is powered by Blogburst. Blogburst is part of blog syndication service Pluck. And, Reuters is one of Pluck's owners.

Complicated? Yes.

The business blogs that Reuters runs are mostly small, one-person operations like Phil's Stock World and Captain Currency. Some, like The Kirk Report and Bill Cara, are well regarded. But, Reuters does them a disservice. It keeps the traffic for their content when it runs on Reuters.com. So, Reuters gets the ad revenue on those pages. The bloggers get their names on Reuters, and a link back to their sites, which is probably rarely used.

It is interesting to note that none of the big business blog sites like SeekingAlpha or Ticker Sense run in the Reuters program. They understand that the deal is good for Reuters and bad for the blogs. They aren't prepared to let Reuters compete with them for eyeballs using their own blog content.

It is a shame that Reuters has handled bloggers this way. Many other media outlets like WSJ.com and TheStreet.com comment on blogs but send traffic to the bloggers. Reuters has decided not to give the little guy a leg up.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St. which was approached about the Reuters program and turned the company down.

In a sign of the increasing importance of high-end financial blogs, Reuters Group Plc (NASDAQ: RTRSY) is starting a new network of the sites. Or, it could be that the Reuters business development people have down time because of its upcoming purchase by Thomson Corp. (NYSE: TOC).

The offer that Reuters is making to a number of high-end blogs is that it will link to the participating sites from Reuters.com, offer free access to selected Reuters Headlines (RSS or Headline Wizard) and Reuters Video Player to publish Reuters News, and get 30% of an advertising program that the big financial services company will manage.

In return, each blog agrees to execute contracts with comScore and NetRatings to assign its traffic to Reuters.com. NetRatings ranks Reuters.com as the No.7 financial website with unique visitors of 6.1 million in May.

Reuters may be trying to match blog initiatives at media outlets including FT.com, WSJ.com, and AOL.com.

Either Reuters has a very high regard for financial blogs or it needs to pump up its audience ratings.

Disclosure: 24/7 Wall St. was approached by Reuters about this opportunity.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a principal at 24/7 Wall St.