We reported last month that blog search engine Technorati had raised $7.6 million in Series C funding in June from previous investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital. Today’s PE Wire now says that Series C funding has hit $10.52 million. The previous investment left many mystified about the implications, today’s news really begs the question of where Technorati is going.
Now three years old, the site just released a major upgrade. We said last time that we assumed this round was done at a flat or down valuation. This may be a bet for the long haul and it may be an attempt to kick the site into action so it can raise more revenue. It’s hard to say, but today’s news that the round C funding was almost 50% larger than previously reported certainly makes things all the more interesting to watch.
See all
Post
A common flaw in most Web 2.0 businesses is the lack of profitability.
I agree, it will be interesting to see how all these “Web 2.0″ companies will be able to survive in the long run. VC money only goes so far, and one day Google and Yahoo are going to stop outbidding themeselves for theses sites as well.
technorati needs to do a better job of showing regular people why their service is relevant and important. You can find stuff in their index which is more useful and more up-to-date then Google– how many other sites can say that?
However their focus on bloggers and not searchers makes the site incomprensible for the type of users who they could realize contextual ad revenues from. They need to split off the essential app (search) from the tools for power users more effectively.
They also ought to make their licensing program easier to use and more transparant, extending their brand across the web. The APIs are great, but if you want to use their stuff commercially, you have to go through layer upon layer of people. A company I consulted for finally gave up and built their own RSS parser and spider, they would have been much happier to simply plop some technorati code into their existing site.
It would be nice if they could fix their bugs… Ever since I “claimed” my blog technorati seemed to have gotten a stuck cache and no longer sees any updates I make. It seems I am not the only one. Given that webscraping a w3 validated site isn’t hard, I have to wonder at the quality of their code. Their service is abysmal (automatic “we got your email”, but no human response). $10 million dollars for something that broke the first week I used it? Wow.