Who wants to pay for paidContent? We’ll find out soon, it seems, because the sales process for the pioneering blog and its parent company ContentNext appears to be wrapping up.

But if you were making a bet, you’d get good odds that the most likely buyer will be GigaOM, another pioneering tech/media business.

People familiar with paidContent believe GigaOM is in the last stages of a deal to purchase the site and its related businesses from Guardian Media Group, which bought the company in 2008 and then put it on the block last fall.

I asked the Guardian about the sale on Friday, and a PR rep told me that “the sale process is ongoing. Beyond that we would not comment.” Last night, I corresponded with GigaOM founder Om Malik, via text message, but he didn’t respond to my question about a potential acquisition.

That’s certainly not the same as a confirmation. But there’s some pleasing logic to a GigaOM/paidContent rollup. Both businesses started as influential one-man blogging operations, then added staff and moved into related operations such as conferences. (Full disclosure: AllThingsD competes with both companies.)

PaidContent founder Rafat Ali left his company a couple years after selling to the Guardian. Malik has sold off chunks of his business to venture capitalists such as True Ventures (where he is now a venture partner) and Reed Elsevier Ventures, who have invested a total of $15 million.

Depending on the price, you could find other strategic buyers that could be interested in paidContent. But I’m told that two of the most logical buyers — WebMediaBrands, which has been stocking up on tech industry publications including Inside Networks, and SAY Media, which recently bought tech blog ReadWriteWeb in December – aren’t in the running.

Other possibles not in the bidding, according to sources: Jim Bankoff’s Vox Media, which owns The Verge tech site; and Dow Jones (which owns this site).

The only other big bidder to consider would be AOL, which owns Engadget and bought TechCrunch in 2010. Sources there said a bid was unlikely, too.

Guardian Media has one for sale. The British publisher is peddling the “Inside.com” domain name, people familiar with the company tell me. Asking price, I’m told, is something north of $100,000.

If that name rings a bell, it’s probably because you used to dine on big, well-prepared plates of media-covering-media during the first boom, when Inside.com spent a lot of money trying to create an industry insider/outsider publishing business.

That didn’t work, and eventually paidContent’s Rafat Ali, an Inside.com veteran himself, bought up the domain in 2008.

The idea was to use the name as an umbrella for his collection of trade sites, and perhaps to help Ali open up a Hollywood outpost. But that never panned out, and if you head to Inside.com now it will direct you to paidContent.

Ali ended up selling that site and its parent company to Guardian Media in 2008, and left two years later. The British company once had aggressive plans to expand in the U.S., but it’s unclear what it intends to do now. Caroline Little, who was running American operations for the publisher, stepped down earlier this year.

I’ve asked Guardian for comment and will update if it has one.

PaidContent’s Rafat Ali, who turned a one-man Web site into a must-read hub for digital media news, is leaving the company he founded eight years ago.

Sources said Ali has told co-workers he will leave the company in early July, which will be two years after he sold ContentNext, PaidContent’s parent company, to the London-based Guardian Media group.

That deal was potentially worth up to $30 million, based on various earn-out goals. But Ali and his investors took home only a portion of that. My best guess is something closer to $12 million.

Ali didn’t tell staff what he intends to do next, sources said, but he recently moved from Los Angeles to New York.

It is not clear who will take over leadership at the sites; the main one had 137,000 unique monthly visitors in April, up from 63,000 in July of 2009, according to comScore (SCOR).

UPDATE: The Guardian confirmed the move, as did Ali in a paidContent post, both of which are below:

Guardian Statement on Rafat’s Departure

Dear Readers,

Our founder, a digital warrior and friend to many of you, Rafat Ali, is stepping down after eight years building and growing ContentNext. As many of you know, Guardian News & Media acquired ContentNext, and Rafat has decided this is a good time for him to take a break and think about the next chapter. This is the statement the Guardian released today.

Caroline Little
CEO, ContentNext
CEO, Guardian North America

—

Guardian News & Media and ContentNext today announced that ContentNext Founder and Editor Rafat Ali will be leaving the company at the beginning of July. Rafat Ali started paidContent as a blog in 2002, and later added three other sites, paidContent.uk, mocoNews and contentSutra, before the business was purchased by Guardian News & Media in 2008. ContentNext now has some 600,000 unique users and its websites, with their blend of news and analysis, are a must read for senior executives in the media, entertainment, publishing, advertising, mobile, marketing and technology sectors.

Tim Brooks, Managing Director of Guardian News & Media, said: “As anyone who follows the company and reads our sites knows, Rafat has done an amazing job of building ContentNext from the ground up and we wish him every success in the future.”

Ernie Sander, who has been the managing editor at ContentNext for the past 18 months, will assume a wider strategic role. Co-editor Staci Kramer, Rafat’s first hire at the company, will continue to be a thought leader on and off the site.

On to Life 2.0

In the end, all things do come to an end. The good and bad part is, it is never a definite marker, but all part of a process. And so it has been for me. After pouring exactly eight years of my life and a lifetime into this, I am leaving ContentNext and paidContent in early July. I will continue to advise the company for the rest of the year.

For most of you who know me, this isn’t coming as a huge surprise. I have been wrestling with this for months now, and the two-year mark under the Guardian and the eight-year mark since I launched the first site, seems appropriate enough as a closure point.

The last two years under Guardian have been illuminating, to say the least. Being part of a big company brings its own level of complexities; during a huge financial crisis, it makes for a roller-coaster ride. The high of the sale dissipated quickly, and pulling back and hunkering down isn’t fun, much less entrepreneurial. To Guardian’s credit, amidst the mothership’s own perfect storm, they stood by us, and we have survived, though much smaller.

I am leaving the company while the editorial is still at the peak of its reputation, even though we are half the team we used to be. It really is a miracle. And the edit leadership under our ME Ernie Sander and my longtime partner-in-crime and co-editor Staci D. Kramer gets the full credit for it, as do our scrappy group of talented journalists. The business side is a rebuild-in-process that I hope Guardian continues to support in kind and spirit.

paidContent and the company has given me a lot: it saved my life, literally (subject of a book someday); it gave me an existence, purpose and sustenance, in that order. It gave me way more chances in life than I probably deserved. I burned the candle on both ends, and then in the middle. And to think that I entered this country little over a decade ago, and in that time, got a degree, worked at two dotcoms, started one, sold it, lived in Bloomington, Ind., NYC, London, Los Angeles and back in NYC, and am now moving on to the next phase of my career. Next phase of my life.

As for my future, the honest answer is, I am in the middle of figuring it out. The good part is I have lots of choices; the bad part is that I have lots of choices. Very likely it will be another startup, in a larger media and marketing space. But in the immediate future, you will see my head pop up in places like Iceland, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Socotra Island (Google it!) and other parts of Central Asia. That’s the head-clearing trip of a lifetime, for the summer months after I finish here.

At the end, I really have to thank my family, friends, colleagues and readers, who cared enough to care. You all gave me and a bunch of us outliers a chance to do something magical for a long time. Please continue reading and supporting paidContent and ContentNext; I merely started the story.

Finally, here’s a video BoomTown’s Kara Swisher did with Ali in 2007 at ContentNext’s then-office in Santa Monica, Calif., and another in Manhattan right after the sale to Guardian Media:

Actually, that turned out to be true. But some angel investors are getting into the game again, and a  small number of VCs have even been able to round up dollars for new investments.

Today’s example: Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners, which has all but completed raising a new fund.

Patricof and his team won’t comment officially about the status of the fund, which follows a $75 million fund he raised four years ago. But he hasn’t been discreet about it, and lots of start-up investors have been chattering about Patricof’s attempt to raise $125 million for new deals.

That’s partly because Patricof is famous in the investment community–his resume goes back to the late 1960s and includes wins in Apple (AAPL) and AOL (AOL), as well as bets on media properties like the Huffington Post and PaidContent’s parent company, ContentNext. And it’s partly because Patricof has, by his own admission, struggled to raise the money over the last year.

Yesterday, for example, Patricof spoke about his fund-raising effort quite candidly at the OnMedia conference. From Mary Kathleen Flynn’s account at The Deal:

“A year ago when we started raising our second fund, which is somewhat bigger, we wanted an institutional base,” Patricof said. “We went out for six months and didn’t get a single response. Then we went back to our original investors, sent out a letter again, and four weeks later we raised a lot of money with just a letter and no phone calls. The individual investor market is a great market.”

Fundraising is “tough” these days, said Patricof. ”But I wouldn’t be smiling as much as I am today if it wasn’t having a positive ending.”

It’s unclear how much Patricof has raised this time. When I talked to him about his progress in mid-November, he told me he thought the fund would be oversubscribed. But sources believe he may also end up breaking the fund into two chunks.

Yesterday, BoomTown was hanging in Hollywood at ContentNext’s EconCeleb’s conference, where I did an onstage interview with legendary editor Bonnie Fuller about the massive impact of the Internet on celebrity journalism.

With its instant ability to deliver news, video and more, sites like TMZ, PerezHilton, The Superficial and Yahoo’s (YHOO) omg! have become massive drivers of traffic on the Internet and–despite the saturation–the arena is still growing fast, especially among women users.

But for those not in the know about Fuller’s impact on how celebrity journalism has developed to its current power, she is the reason–more than any other modern editor–humanity now knows every move made by the unholy trio of Paris, Lindsay and, most of all, Britney.

As founding editor of US Weekly (with stints at Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and other mags), and as the editorial director of the parent company of Star magazine, Fuller’s various editorial innovations–celebrities are just like us!–are now commonplace.

And like a lot of old media stars, Fuller is now working on her own new celeb-focused digital and media company, which she says is aimed at women 20 to 40 years old, plunging headlong into the Web arena.

Here’s my video interview with her in an alcove of the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, where we discuss what she is up to and where online celebrity coverage is going (Britney 24-7!):

At its EconCeleb conference in Hollywood today, ContentNext released its list of the most influential and innovative online celebrities today.

It is an interesting and varied list that includes everyone from powerhouse Oprah (pictured here, of course!) to the bisexual sprite, Tila Tequila.

The list, in ascending order:

10. Martha Stewart (she is actually a closet geek)

9. Tila Tequila (vile, but in a good way)

8. Peter Gabriel (a longtime Web pioneer in the digital music space)

7. Radiohead (innovative band pushing Web distribution boundaries)

6. Stephen Colbert (funny online and off)

5. 50 Cent (the urban rap artist as nerd)

4. Oprah Winfrey (um, she’s runs the real world and could run the Internet if she felt like it)

3. Ashton Kutcher (not just a pretty face, but one who gets the power of viral marketing)

2. Will.i.am (for that Barack Obama mashup video alone)

1. Will Ferrell, Chris Henchy & Adam McKay (FunnyOrDie.com might not make money, but it is very funny)

I have posted below a video interview with ContentNext’s founder Rafat Ali, who spoke about the deal. I caught up with him in his New York hotel this morning (by coincidence I flew into New York today on a redeye).

But the deal–which comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million–begs the question of which tech blog might be next to be acquired.

And, after much noisy poking around today, BoomTown is giving the nod to one of the sector’s larger and splashier sites: TechCrunch.

Several sources told me TechCrunch has been in off-and-on talks recently with Time Warner’s AOL (TWX), which wants to pay from $20 and $30 million for the site.

I could not find out what price TechCrunch thinks is fair, although one might assume it is higher than that.

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde told me via email that she had no comment. “My policy is not to comment on rumors of our business,” she wrote.

TechCrunch, which was founded in mid-2005 by Michael Arrington, is a group-edited blog that has grown large by focusing–”obsessively,” according to the site’s About page–on Web 2.0 start-ups, covering every jog and tittle of their life cycles.

Sources said the talks between TechCrunch and AOL have been ongoing for the past six to eight weeks, although the site has been in talks with several other large media companies interested in it in the past and these have not led to an acquisition.

AOL would probably be a good home for a site like TechCrunch, since it has a blog focus from its own Switched site and sites it bought, like Engadget.

AOL acquired that popular gadget site in 2005 in the $25 million acquisition of Weblogs, which was founded by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis.

Calacanis, by the way, runs an annual tech conference with TechCrunch, now called TechCrunch50.

Also, I have stayed in Calacanis’s house in the Brentwood (see post and video here), when I was interviewing a Disney exec onstage at a paidContent conference in Los Angeles recently.

Oh, yes, it’s a small tech blogging world after all.

But the money has suddenly become big for the sites involved in that universe too, although most still have relatively small businesses.

Nonetheless, tech bloggers have grown in number and influence, as sites–like this one–compete to break news and attract readers.

Such efforts take funding–despite the lower costs as compared with traditional media–and this probably means inevitable consolidation.

Before its acquisition by Guardian, for example, ContentNext had been raising several million dollars recently to fuel more expansion.

Other sites have also recently raised funds, such as GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider and VentureBeat.

Most of them have also been talking about various roll-ups between and among one other. Sources told me that VentureBeat, for example, has spoken separately in the past to both paidContent and TechCrunch about joining forces.

VentureBeat’s Founder Matt Marshall would not comment on that, but did note that “size matters, so you have to do what you can to get the economics of scale.”

That includes adding on more sites and doing conferences, as VentureBeat has done (its new conference is called MobileBeat, for example, which will take place in Sunnyvale, Calif. on July 24.)

“Consolidation is what you are probably going to see,” predicted Marshall about the tech blogging arena.

Here’s ContentNext’s Ali talking about exactly that and more today:

In what will be seen as a new media coup, sources tell BoomTown that Britain’s Guardian Media Group is set to announce this morning that it will buy the company that runs the high-profile digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”

That price, though, includes an earn-out, sources said, which will depend on future performance of the company.

The paidContent site is owned by ContentNext and was founded by Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali in 2002.

With the motto,”The Economics of Content,” paidContent has been a pioneer in the online news space, doing high-quality reporting about online media and digital efforts by big media companies.

ContentNext has offices in Santa Monica, Calif., and Manhattan and operates several other sites, and also runs several conferences.

The company had reportedly been raising funding of several million dollars recently to fuel more expansion.

But ContentNext’s only financial backer so far has been Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners, which invested an undisclosed amount in 2006.

Longtime digital media exec Larry Kramer is on its board and ContentNext recently hired media exec Nathan Richardson as its CEO.

Sources said ContentNext would continue being run independently after the Guardian purchase.

This sale comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica, a much larger tech-focused site, to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million.

More to come soon.

But until then, here’s a video I did with Ali just over a year ago in a when I visited his then-new offices in Santa Monica.

While publisher and editor Ali’s got two other sites, the flagship is paidContent.org, which covers the business of digital content with a fine-tooth comb.

Ali started the site in 2002 after stints at Silicon Alley Reporter and the ill-timed Inside.com. But his entrepreneurial effort has taken off and become one of the better sites for up-to-the-minute information about the online media business.

Just this weekend, for example, Ali broke the news that Wenda Harris Millard was out as Yahoo’s ad chief (though I did predict the move–an educated guess on my part–here last week), as well as posting stories about breaking news at Dow Jones, ABC and the $8 million in funding that Digg founders just got for their new online video show site, Revision3.

ContentNext got a small amount of funding last summer from Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners and recently added longtime online exec Larry Kramer to the board. The company now has 20 employees, including the tireless executive editor Staci Kramer. It makes its revenue via advertising and now also from conferences.

So here is a video I did on my recent visit to ContentNext’s Santa Monica, Calif., digs, which they moved into in March (most of the company’s offices had previously been at Ali’s various homes), along with some observations from Ali: