GigaOm raises $2.5M, claims 10,000 Pro subscribers

Giga Omni Media, the company that runs GigaOm and related tech blogs, has raised $2.5 million in a fourth round of funding.

That’s kind of remarkable, since GigaOm was already one of the most highly funded blogs around. TechCrunch, which was just acquired by AOL, never raised venture funding. VentureBeat (yes, this very blog) raised less than $1 million from various angel investors. Business Insider has raised more than $6 million. With the new round, GigaOm’s total funding tops $8 million.

Those amounts are tiny compared to many of the other venture fundings we cover, but it’s not clear whether any of the tech blogs can become a major business. (The Huffington Post has raised much more, but it’s outside the tech world, and is one of the most popular sites on the Web.)

So how is GigaOm going to justify all that money? Well it’s aiming to be more than a blog. Founder Om Malik said some of the money will continue the growth of the GigaOm Pro service, which he said already has 10,000 subscribers. Access to the Pro site’s research and analysis costs $199 per year, and even though some of those subscribers probably aren’t paying full price (especially since the service launched at $79 per year), it sounds like a sizable source of revenue.

Malik also said he will also continue investing on the technology side:

Most folks think of us as a blog network, but we have quietly built-up a large, custom laundry list of technology assets that could exist as standalone tools. For instance, we’ve built a dashboard that gives us near-real time view of what’s happening on our network. It allows us to constantly monitor our revenues, page views and site performance

We’ve developed a virtual content router that allows us to not only take content from our sites and make it ready for any screen: iPhone, Android phones and iPads. If Steve Jobs wants to throw another device at us, we’re ready for that too.

Meanwhile, Malik said the blog network is getting 4 million unique visitors per month, and that the conference business is going fine, thanks.

The funding came from True Ventures and Alloy Ventures. Both firms previously invested in GigaOm, and Malik is actually a partner at True. The news was first reported in TechCrunch based on a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. (A nice reversal, since GigaOm broke the news about TechCrunch’s acquisition.)