« Previous post
Next post »

April 14, 2008

AOL Buys Sphere’s Blog Content Engine

Michael Arrington

41 comments »

Tomorrow AOL will announce the acquisition of San Francisco-based Sphere, a blog content engine that launched in 2006. The price is not being disclosed, but sources are suggesting it’s in the $25 million range, or possibly a little more. More details from Om Malik

When Sphere first launched as a blog search engine they were already late to the blog search game. Technorati and others had been around for some time already, and even Google Blog Search was nearly eight months old. Sphere had some nice features, but it was in a tough and competitive space.

But CEO Tony Conrad, a former venture capitalist, quickly adapted to the changing market and focused on delivering blog results relevant to content delivered by big news and content sites. Time was the first to go live with “Sphere It” links, and most of the big news sites followed over time. In July 2007 we noted that they had very quietly completed a transformation into a “related content” engine.

Sphere lands in Bill Wilson’s organization, the EVP of Programming at AOL. His division controls AOL’s content properties (Entertainment, Finance, Weblogs, etc.). In a phone call today, Wilson told me he doesn’t intend to change Sphere’s approach or brand. They are growing a number of micro/niche brands, he said, and leveraging what he calls “passion points” of small but passionate audiences. Sphere fits right into that by showing relevant content to users, and getting AOL content in front of more users.

Congratulations to Conrad on the aquisition, as well as the rest of the Sphere team (Martin Remy, Steve Nieker, Toni Schneider, Mike Garfias, Alex Bendig, Andy Cabell, Anne Dorman, Jeff Yolen, Adam Embick, Josh Guttman, Kevin Cowan, Sven Henderson, Troy Vitullo and Michael Harzheim). Sphere had raised $3.5 million in venture capital over two rounds.

CrunchBase Information
Sphere
Information provided by CrunchBase
  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Personal Note: Conrad Got Mailed. - GigaOM

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:12 pm

  2. Photo Matt » On Sphere

    April 14th, 2008 at 11:39 pm

  3. Tiago Dória Weblog » Blog Archive » Unir mídia “velha” com nova e social dá dinheiro

    April 15th, 2008 at 1:11 am

  4. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » AOL、ブログ・コンテンツ提供エンジンのSphereを買収

    April 15th, 2008 at 2:21 am

  5. DealTracker - AOL Buys Sphere’s Blog Content Engine | WildBlueSkies - Trends and strategies in Digital Media

    April 15th, 2008 at 3:54 am

  6. AOL acquires Sphere for approximately $25m : The Blog Herald

    April 15th, 2008 at 5:29 am

  7. AOL Acquires Sphere | Pro Blogging News

    April 15th, 2008 at 5:54 am

  8. AOL compra Sphere Loogic.com Blog Archive

    April 15th, 2008 at 6:23 am

  9. AOL buys Sphere.com for $25M | Compaholics.com

    April 15th, 2008 at 1:16 pm

  10. ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA « Daily Marauder

    April 15th, 2008 at 3:32 pm

  11. AOL купи Sphere

    April 16th, 2008 at 12:00 am

  12. Sphere’s been sold to AOL. What’s next?

    April 16th, 2008 at 2:22 pm

  13. Amid “reinvention”, AOL snaps up Sphere » VentureBeat

    April 17th, 2008 at 7:30 am

  14. ICT magazine » Internet » AOL Acquires Sphere & Creates Search Interface For iPhone · Information & Communications Technology magazine

    April 19th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

  15. Sphere Bought by AOL, now with better Wordpress Integration | Widgets Lab

    April 25th, 2008 at 6:13 pm

  16. AOL Bought Sphere Blog Content Engine

    May 17th, 2008 at 5:14 am

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. NextBIGThing

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:07 pm

    It would of been better if someone else bought this. Sphere is pretty cool and hopefully they will keep the momentum going.

    Hope its ends up better than delicious

  2. Asus

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:08 pm

    According to compete.com, they went from 0 visitors a year ago to 1,688,973 last month and to the $25 mil payout this month. Nice flip.

  3. Brian

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:24 pm

    Great acquisition for both AOL and Sphere. What does this mean for technorati?

  4. Yakov

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:25 pm

    AOL could leverage it “related links” service across its web properties as well as launch its own news/blog search engine

  5. Wayne Lambright

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:37 pm

    Congratulations to the Sphere team.

  6. frames

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:45 pm

    its own news/blog search engine

  7. watch tv

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:48 pm

    :)

  8. tony conrad

    April 14th, 2008 at 10:00 pm

    Thanks Mike - you introduced Sphere (twice!) and it’s niced to have you close the loop and make the announcement. It’s been a fun ride and we’re really thrilled about joining AOL.

  9. MyBlogFans

    April 14th, 2008 at 10:08 pm

    Sphere It, a very nice and elegant service, well deserving the exit, congrats! 8-)

  10. 113.com

    April 14th, 2008 at 10:18 pm

    Impressive AOL, aggressively… nice for the startup market!

  11. Fabian Schonholz

    April 14th, 2008 at 10:33 pm

    Congrats!!

  12. Duncan Riley

    April 14th, 2008 at 10:36 pm

    AOL has a good eye for buying startups lately.

  13. Rick Calvert

    April 14th, 2008 at 10:42 pm

    Congrats to Tony and his team. Sphere is a great product and a great group of folks.

  14. JoeUser

    April 14th, 2008 at 10:45 pm

    $25M of which probably half goes to the VC, angels, friends+family and whoever else provided early funding. Next in line would be the 4! main founders, and then finally the 10 employees. So $12M to spread across 14 people, heavily weighted in favor of the founders, of course. So say $8M for the founders at $2M each and $4M for the 10 employees, which would amount to $400k each, pre-tax. That’s an average year for a decent engineer at Google or Yahoo when you factor in ESPP, grants and bonuses.

    My point is simply that $25M is not a lot of money for what appears to be a successful company.

  15. Otis Gospodnetic

    April 14th, 2008 at 11:02 pm

    JoeUser:
    Sure, but that $400K is on top of their salaries. They won’t be able to retire, but…

  16. Jon Callaghan

    April 14th, 2008 at 11:03 pm

    Congrats TC and Team for such a great win!!! This has been a terrific entrepreneur’s journey, and you really deserve this.

    Thank you for your incredible dedication, creativity and hard work from all of us at True.

    Well done.

    Best,
    Jon

  17. Jeffro2pt0

    April 14th, 2008 at 11:39 pm

    Is that the same Toni Schneider who is CEO of Automattic?

  18. Media Strategy

    April 15th, 2008 at 1:59 am

    Great going - and in just about 30 months.

  19. Matt

    April 15th, 2008 at 5:22 am

    Who else provides a similar service to Sphere?

  20. Chris R

    April 15th, 2008 at 6:10 am

    I wonder how much http://www.nametaggs.com would go for….

  21. Jim Simmons

    April 15th, 2008 at 6:57 am

    Congratulations to everyone involved! This was a great move by AOL.

    First Goowy and now Sphere. I’m detecting a trend ;-).

  22. VentureDeal

    April 15th, 2008 at 7:10 am

    Usually these “feature” startups are bought for the make or buy price range of $10 - $25 million.

  23. Conteio

    April 15th, 2008 at 7:12 am

    @Matt - Who else provides a similar service to Sphere?

    Give Conteio’s alpha DEMO a try: http://www.conteio.com/site-demo-query2/
    We’ve got a testing corpus of >2M news articles so far & the entire English Wikipedia that we can match/relate content to.
    It works very well on news articles.
    Good luck on your quest!
    Conteio

  24. Nikos Iatropoulos

    April 15th, 2008 at 11:42 am

    Hi Matt, Lingospot is a similar service to Sphere in our focus on content discovery, but our services are primarily in-text. You can check it out at http://www.lingospot.com.

    Congrats to Tony and his team for a great run and a successful exit!

  25. JoeUser

    April 15th, 2008 at 9:23 pm

    Otis, my point was more that $400k (which is probably a very generous guess) is very little in the risk/reward game. For an engineer to take a gamble on joining a small startup, the reward needs to be higher given that so many of them don’t make it. If you can coast along in a larger more stable company making 80% of that every year guaranteed, why in the world would you take the startup risk. Of course, the founder math is completely different, but if the founders can’t hire engineers, they aren’t going to get very far.

« Previous post
Next post »