MyBlogLog to be Acquired by in Acquisition Discussions with Yahoo

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1. Sundar
   

   November 17th, 2006 at 10:24 am

   Nit really — you mean to say “…news has emerged that Yahoo has agreed to acquire MyBlogLog” instead “news has emerged that MyBlogLog has agreed to acquire MyBlogLog”.

2. Marshall Kirkpatrick
   

   November 17th, 2006 at 10:26 am

   Thanks Sundar, these stories obviously get pretty inward looking sometimes.

3. Dave Coleman
   

   November 17th, 2006 at 10:28 am

   more yahoo acquisitions????

4. Dave Coleman
   

   November 17th, 2006 at 10:30 am

   I think Kenet Works has also been acquired by them today

5. Noel McKinney
   

   November 17th, 2006 at 10:47 am

   I joined MyBlogLog, a new little startup where the founders reply to your messages, a month ago and it’s just now being acquired by Yahoo… what took so long?

6. sam kircher
   

   November 17th, 2006 at 10:56 am

   who’s next to be yagobbled? popurls would be a nice one imho

7. Boris
   

   November 17th, 2006 at 11:01 am

   Wow, this is great news. I hope Scott Rafer is now a multi-miljonair. He deserves it…

8. mesattack
   

   November 17th, 2006 at 11:07 am

   This deal is *too cheap*. If these guys waited another year, added some meaningful revenue, and continue their metioric traffic rise they could easily get 2-4X more for the property. And I am always saying things are too expensive…

9. Ivan Pope
   

   November 17th, 2006 at 11:08 am

   What ever happened to growing a business? What ever happened to innovation? What ever happened to deciding your own future? These companies get sucked into Yagoogle and all innovation stops.

10. DavidEzra
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 11:16 am

    Nooooooo … I love MyBlogLog the way it is.

    I hope Yahoo! doesn’t screw it up.

11. saravanan
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 11:17 am

    ahh, Is it valuable for 10M ?

12. Webomatica
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 11:21 am

    Argh… at first I read “my blog” and then thought TechCrunch was being bought by Yahoo!.

13. Ralph
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 11:25 am

    It’s really interesting to see all of the M&A activity. On one hand a person might think that this is a new Internet Bubble…instead of the public owners shares of a company and watching their portfolio skyrocket, the big web companies are doing the “collecting” of companies and hoping to strike it rich.

    Maybe it’s not a bubble. Maybe it’s simply the natural progression of a market maturing. Maybe the large fish swallowing the small fish is the natural next step for web site advancement.

    Well, it sure is fun to speculate and watch as all of these transactions and acquisitions occur.

14. Ralph
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 11:27 am

    oops…I wrote that comment and forgot the most important comment… I’m a fan of MyBlogLog, and on one hand it’s great to see them “progress” to a larger environment. On the other hand, I wonder what will change.

    Congrats to MyBlogLog on their current and future success.

15. Windeye
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 11:40 am

    Kenet Works has a nice java mobile app with chat and location functions that integrates with community sites, the plan seems to be to roll it out around the world now.

16. Kevin Burton
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 11:58 am

    Woah…. congrats guys!

17. Drama 2.0
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 11:59 am

    Looks like Yahoo’s strategy is to acquire small startups at a very early stage before they have significant mainstream traction and to hope that they can grow them into something of material substance. I personally don’t see that happening with Bix and MyBlogLog.

    The problem Yahoo has is that their stock has been hammered while Google’s has been rewarded. Personally, I think the extent to which this has occurred is unjustified but I don’t see any of Yahoo’s small acquisitions creating much shareholder value and they certainly won’t excite investors.

    While I think there’s a significant risk that Google’s acquisition of YouTube will be a failure in the long run, there can be no doubt that it excited investors and the ensuing increase in stock price basically paid for the acquisition. Yahoo’s acquisitions of companies that almost nobody has heard about outside of the small technology community are not going to help the stock and might actually hurt it. While I don’t think a Facebook acquisition for $1-$2 billion would be wise long-term, the problem is that Wall Street can be very short-sighted and if Yahoo continues to get hammered, it can create a situation where Yahoo’s long-term strategy, which might be very solid, is compromised due to financial pressures from a continued outflow of investor money.

    Being a public company is a difficult thing and the return of private equity and LBOs is very appealing to many companies because when you’re private you don’t have to deal with all the crap of being a public company.

18. Steve Poland
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 12:09 pm

    I love MyBlogLog and congrats to them! But I agree with @mesattack — I think another year and this service will be blowing up — and $10mm will seem like the deal of the year. Nice pull MyBlogLog, but also, nice pull Yahoo!

19. Robot Dean Martin
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 12:11 pm

    Are Yahoo and Google in a big battle to acquire as much as they can? Could it lead to both of their demises? The next great .COM meltdown? Tune in next week. At the rate things are moving on the internet these days, that’s when we’ll probably find out.

20. webmonkian
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 12:12 pm

    congrats to the mybloglog founders and commiserations to it’s users

    the market is clearly very inefficient. the fact that a company that is only a few months old with no obvious business model can achieve a ~$10m valuation is amazing!

21. Andrew
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 12:27 pm

    This is great for mybloglog, but seriously if you are a yahoo investor you have got to be concerned about yahoo’s future. All these purchases are just not making them enough money. Yahoo needs to focus on their ppc system which really sucks.

22. Marshall Kirkpatrick
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 12:36 pm

    Re biz model, MyBlogLog does have one. It may not bring in massive bucks, but they offer premium traffic analytics and demographics. Plus it’s so much fun to click around inside MyBlogLog that I’m sure Yahoo! will see it as good to put ads on.

23. Jason M. Lemkin
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 12:39 pm

    $10m is nothing for Yahoo if they see a way to scale something up. MyBlogLog creates both a way to insert Yahoo directly into many blogs and also insert into an interesting social tool around the blogging community. The revenue is irrelevant, even if they bought say TypePad for far far more, the revenue itself wouldn’t have a material impact anyway.

24. Alex Iskold
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 1:12 pm

    I think that it was well worth the money for yahoo! This can be extended in many different ways, and as Marshall is pointing out spiced up with ads.

    Alex

25. People Finder
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 2:28 pm

    All these varied acquisitions by Yahoo seem to tell me that they have ceded the search engine war to Google and they are now trying to be a Jack of all trades and master of none.

26. basicity
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 2:49 pm

    Wow, that was a fast track from beta launch to being acquired by Yahoo! Congrats!

27. shadilac
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 4:34 pm

    I don’t understand why people are always so afraid that Yahoo will mess up any new startup. They have a pretty good track record, recently.

28. psw
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 5:39 pm

    Hopefully Yahoo can get this aquistion to work. I think the best idea would be to differentiate from Google, not try to compete with them. I believe that this aquistion will help lean them in that direction.

29. Derek Anderson
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 6:32 pm

    It’s almost too bad it wasn’t Google that acquired MyBlogLog. I like FREE but Yahoo doesn’t.

    I did purchase a 1 year sub. to MyBlogLog. This was one of the only services that I found worthwhile to pay for.

    Well…things change by the second on the Internet…Hell two days ago I was widgetlab.com then I purchased an ’s’ and made it http://www.widgetslab.com/

    what a difference that made

30. jr
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 7:22 pm

    Derek

    Last time I checked, Flickr, del.icio.us, webjay and most of the other acquisitions were all free. Come to think of it, you could even argue that Yahoo! made Oddpost free by turning it into the new Y!Mail beta.

    Have a little trust that they did learn from very old mistakes.

31. sr
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 8:14 pm

    Yahoo’s mean IQ is getting watered down with such social networking
    acquisitions (you could argue that its emotional IQ is increasing).
    Google meanwhile is crushing Yahoo where it requires smarts
    (search and advertising)

32. Pramit Singh
    

    November 17th, 2006 at 9:47 pm

    While Google goes for big ticket buyouts, Yahoo plays it smart and gathers the interesting new small fish.

33. OS9USER
    

    November 18th, 2006 at 2:11 am

    Hello everyone. This story is reported on 3 websites so far That I have found. 2 Sites say this is true, and this one say’s it is not.

    It will hit my top news today as well.

    OS9USER

34. Rodney Rumford
    

    November 18th, 2006 at 3:18 am

    Marshall,
    Thanks for the correction. Just the fact that they are “suppossedly” in discussions with Yahoo is very telling. MyBlogLog is an amazing concept that has been well executed and adopted. Like you said… I am sure Scott is happy with the attention and buzz that will only push the adoption rate higher.

    Rodney Rumford

35. Eric Jackson
    

    November 18th, 2006 at 10:41 am

    It would be a great fit.

    However, more work needs to be done.

    Here’s an open letter to Jerry Yang and David Filo: http://breakoutperformance.blo.....david.html

    Thanks,

    Eric

36. Nabeel Hyatt
    

    November 18th, 2006 at 11:46 am

    Yahoo has done a decent job not screwing up Flickr and Delicious, so if Mybloglog now has a happy home then more power to it. I don’t see how the company would become an unbelievable success on it’s own, but I love the service, so why not.

37. William
    

    November 18th, 2006 at 12:13 pm

    What you all are missing is the true value of MyBlogLog, the data.

    Do you realize how much data they have?

    Do you even have a clue? For each user they track which other sites in the MyBlogLog network they go to, what they click, where they go, and can infer from that where they are, their demographics, and more.

    It’s a gold mine. No buts about it.

38. David Mackey
    

    November 20th, 2006 at 7:42 pm

    Be interesting to see where Yahoo! is heading over the next few months. They have whipped up some decently impressive stuff with their new Mail interface and the myweb search.

39. Sam
    

    November 23rd, 2006 at 6:10 pm

    How and Why Techcrunch ditched MyBlogLog ?
    http://itsoup.blogspot.com/200.....tched.html

40. Ryan Marle
    

    December 10th, 2006 at 11:46 am

    I think that it would be unfortunate for Yahoo to acquire it because it doesn’t align with Yahoo’s culture right now. Google has Yahoo backed up against the ropes and Yahoo is trying to buy innovation as opposed to change the company culture back to innovation. Just look at some of the other acquisitions that Yahoo has made recently. Most have gone from promising and innovative to settling into mediocrity. Why? Yahoo has lost it’s purpose.

    If Yahoo did acquire it, it is because they are desperately trying to stay afloat. Their intention is not to incorporate and integrate it into their values for the purpose of creating powerful change in the online world.

    Need more proof? Just look at Yahoo’s pitiful, cookie cutter, mission and values. Now Look at Google’s

    Bottom line, I think that Yahoo would douse the flames.