Rafat Ali started blogging three years ago as a way to land a job. Instead of looking for a job, he ended up running a new media start-up.

The blog has grown from a one-person operation to a new media start-up with a strong revenue stream. His three sites: paidContent, Moconews and ContentSutra log about five million visitors a month.

In the aftermath of the dot com bust in the early 2000, Rafat found it hard to find a job in a media company. Prior to that he worked at Silicon Alley Reporter, Venture Reporter and Inside.com . He tried blogging as a creative way to broadcast his resume. That blog site paidContent.org instead turned into his professional career. He suddenly realized that his site was generating a substantial amount of traffic and started including advertisements.

paidContent.org provides digital news and classifieds; Moconews.net provides mobile content news; and ContentSutra.com provides digital news from India.

Rafat started blogging when he was in New York, then he moved to London and moved back to US and is currently located in Los Angeles. Until recently Rafat and his virtual team worked from their homes, but recently Rafat set up a physical office in Los Angeles. His team is fanned across different parts of the world like the UK, Mexico, and India.

Rafat has an engineering degree from Aligarh Muslim University, India. Since his primary interest was in media his first job was working for an advertising agency in New Delhi, India. He then came to the USA and completed his MA in Journalism from Indiana University, Bloomington.

Rafat lives with his wife Najmia in Los Angeles.

This interview was originally recorded in London at a Reuters Conference in May 2006. In mid-2008 Rafat announced that his company was being acquired by UK’s Guardian Group for $30 million.

Technorati Tags: Rafat Ali,PaidContent,ContentSutra,Mobile,Technology,Web 2.0,Entrepreneur,Media,Los Angeles,India