Odeo Put Up for Sale
Marshall Kirkpatrick
18 comments »
Evan Williams, the man who co-founded blogger.com foundation Pyra Labs with Meg Hourihan, has put his beleaguered product Odeo up for sale. Odeo is a consumer facing audio service that’s been remarkably high profile about its struggles over the past year; Williams discussed mistakes candidly and bought the company back from investors in October. The site continues to get respectable traffic and Williams believes he will be able to get a fair price for the whole Odeo package. Williams reports the site saw 684,951 visitors last month, 3,012,921 pageviews and perhaps most importantly these days 1,523,963 Flash plays.
AdSense is reportedly paying for Odeo to survive but that development efforts have stalled since the company launched Twitter, an SMS service that’s a favorite among Bay Area web aficionados. Another Evan Williams company, AudioBlogger, was shuttered in November.
People close to Odeo had said that it was changing focus away from the company’s original mission and towards other types of media more than a year ago. Browser based audio messaging is something that a number of other companies, including Evoca and MyChingo, are also trying to make work. Much like user generated video - it’s hard to monetize. SMS services, with money changing hands with every user action, is a different game. It’s one that allows for a lot of innovation as well; the Twittr team is working on microformats for example.
As for Odeo, Williams says that a putting something up for sale doesn’t have to be a sign of desperation and in fact indicates that the seller believes it has value. Williams presumably paid more than $5 million for the company when he bought it back from his investors last year. It will be interesting to see whether anyone wants to spend some good money on it now and what they will do with it.
It’s Twitter, not Twittr. Also the link is wrong (twitter.com)
Thanks, reflex spelling.
This is not surprising. Odeo has never addressed a fundamental flaw in its architecture which prevents anyone using it for more than a few days. The single RSS feed of all subscribed podcasts grows longer and longer and there’s no sensible way to keep it trimmed, e.g. there’s no way to say “keep only the last 100 podcasts” or “keep only podcasts in the last week”. You have to constantly go in and delete them manually, or you end up with afeed containing thousands of items.
Once a feed hits more than several hundred items, which can happen in a week or so, it’s unusable. ITunes freezes completely and other podcatchers like Juice become virtually unusable.
So Odeo rules out loyal users by design.
Worse, they have done nothing to resolve this problem or even acknowledge it. I blogged about it months ago (http://softwareas.com/odeo-engineering-against-customer-loyalty) and asked their support about it, but never received any response via either avenue. Since then, I’ve been using PodNova, whose website is not as slick, but at least it does what a podcast service is meant to do.
No podcasting service is perfect, but there is a future for Odeo. I think the buyer should combine this with Gabcast — http://www.gabcast.com, which is a highly robust record-by-phone podcasting serviced based on the Asterisk VoIP platform.
In fact, I got Tom Keating over at TMCNet to cover these guys on two separate occasions, where he points out my Top 5 reasons for using the service as well as my interview with Digium’s then President, Mark Spencer:
http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/to.....ervice.asp
http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/to.....erview.asp
Yes, No podcasting service is perfect… I agree that:)
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http://www.MillionReturn.Com — Return $1m from 1 page! How?
i believe in the future of podcasting service. i like to think of odeo as youtube, ie a great idea but with usability that can be tweaked. remember that blogs
For what it’s worth, their blog is unreachable from where I am currently (China) - timeout. Apparently, that’s the Great Wall of China in action, as I can reach the site via an anonymous proxy.
why can’t i just upload music to odeo? if they let people do this they could be the youtube of audio.
i am looking for a way to upload music to a site, and imbed a player in my blog. is that too hard? i asked this same question here in the forums
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HF
How many think it will sell for the 5mil he bought it for? or does he even believe it will sell for that much or is he just desperate????
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http://www.randombull.net
They’re not selling the startup. The startup is called Obvious. The product now for sale is Odeo. The newer, hotter product is Twitter, and I dare say it’s catching on.
This is pretty, er, obvious from reading line one of Ev’s blog post.
Seems like a pretty good move. Faceless audio content that is unpredictable is destined to be a dead medium.
I feel the water rising in the deadpool.
I wonder if podcast is really catching up. So much talk, but so little action.
I listen to podcast, say , once a week. But how big the podcast community has to become to have enough momentum to fuel sites like odeo?