Top10Media, parent company to Massachusetts based TopTenSources, a human edited blog aggregator, has raised $3.5 million in a venture round led by Highland Capital (see our previous coverage of TopTenSources here). They are also announcing their acquisition of Blogniscient, a TechMeme-style blog news aggregator. We compared Blogniscient to TechMeme and other competitors in October 2005 and again in February 2006.
Top10Media also acquired StyleFeeder in June 2006.
How big is their readership? Seems interesting, but with new tools available on some sites it’s very easy for anyone to create their own news blog and compete. How much of their editing is done by staff and how much is done by “citizen editors”?
$3.5 million for a “human” edited blog aggregator!!! I just hope this isn’t a sign of bubble.
Their readership seems pretty low for this sort of an investment, at least judging by the available Alexa data
It isn’t even humans choosing the entries: Humans just choose their favorite feeds. Ten of them. We are truly in a bubble.
I was going to ask about their readership, but Jonas was faster.
So, instead, I’ll ask how Blogscient is different Discover feature? (see http://www.tech...ti.com/discover ). Thanks.
Does anyone track companies they think are doomed to failure, in advance of that fact? Any site with traffic this miniscule that’s in receipt of that much money should be right at the top of the list. Etoys.com, anyone?
The upshot: if you can’t get funding for your blogtacular startup in this climate, you have got to be some kind of fool.
A fool and their money …
@Startups.in/India
I didn’t want to mention the word Bubble. And are they previously using blogspot !!
Seems like they were. Can someone confirm this ?
maybe no officially but for something… http://top10sou...rces-world.html
I don’t like to comment negatively on a start-ups and funding… but this is just lame. They dont have any traction, their is no interesting technology and their vision doesn’t seem compelling at all. Anyone know who funded them?
It seems that every joe, dick and harry gets funded these days. I wonder when this VC craze will reach my part of the world.
You didn’t read their business plan, you don’t know what they have in mind.. It’s hard to judge this investment without these data.
“Does anyone track companies they think are doomed to failure, in advance of that fact? Any site with traffic this miniscule that’s in receipt of that much money should be right at the top of the list.”
Of course not. VCs don’t invest in companies that are ALREADY successful. They’re investing because of the potential of success. The earlier you get in the higher your return.
I actually really like this idea for a business or a website. Weather it’s worth $3.5M though can’t be worked out from alexa data or anything like that (unless of course it IS a youtube or a myspace).
This is a great idea that they will have compiled a list of the best 10 blogs for a certain topic. I could see this being bought out by someone else once the community builds up (which I can actually see it will).
For instance from the looks of this, if i wanted to look for information on the Google Youtube buyout, then in theory I could find the first/best posts on that (as opposed to any of the thousands of tech bloggers that post their stupid opinions and badly thought out posts) and I’d probably end up at techcrunch or gigaom or something with that calibre. Surely something with this authority has the ability to survive in the current world of human driven networks (digg etc)?
Hi everyone = Just a quick note to mention I’ve been the CEO of TopTen most of this year, but have been thrilled to hand over that responsibility to Ashton Peery, our new President, as I move over to CMO. He’s got tons more experience than me in management and technology, has worked with Lucent Ventures, been involved in every part of building, selling, merging businesses and we’re lucky to have him guiding this ship.
As we were discussing at The Blog Business Summit this past week in Seattle, RSS is such a rich area we’re playing in, and as John Batelle said at the conference, whoever cracks the code and leverages the power of this awesome technology really will be the next big story in technology.
Our CTO, Ben Ruedlinger, who invented Blogniscient can tell you more about that cool engine. I’m asking him to add a comment here. He’s one of those MIT brainiacs, so I don’t pretend to know how the stuff actually works behind the curtain, I yield the floor to him.
Cheers — Halley Suitt
CMO, TopTenSources + StyleFeeder
First, thank you to Mike for the mention.
Our goal at Top 10 Sources is to:
a) provide our readers with easy access to the best content on a particular topic whether it comes from a blog, video, podcast, or the mainstream news, and
b) provide the tools to enable the “Citizen Editor” to easily assemble this best-of-breed content with minimal effort
We currently have pages on hundreds of topics providing our readers with timely, relevant content on subjects ranging from Social Networks ( http://www.topt...ocial-Networks/ ) to the battle for Congressional Control ( http://www.topt...2006-Elections/ ). Bringing together hand-selected content from a variety of sources allows our readers to get a more complete picture of what is happening in the topic areas they care about most.
In the coming weeks, we will be making some major announcments with regard to our Citizen Editor platform (currently in private beta). We believe that there is a major opportunity to provide a next-generation set of publishing capabilities for people who want to share their expertise and passion with others without having to spend the time to write lengthy blog posts multiple times a day. Overall, we aim to make the sharing and consuption of rich, new media content simple and easy for everyone.
Ben Ruedlinger
CTO, Top Ten Media, Inc.
“Overall, we aim to make the sharing and consuption of rich, new media content simple and easy for everyone.”
it’s called a ‘news blog’ at feedbite.