Technorati continues to redefine itself under CEO Richard Jalichandra, who joined the company in October 2007. In June they launched Technorati Media, a blog advertising network.
Today they are announcing the acquisition of Blogcritics, a six year old blog network that we first wrote about in 2005. The price, which was all cash, is not being disclosed but our guess is that it is in the $1 million range.
Blogcritics is similar to Salon’s newly launched Open Salon, which lets lots of people write articles from time to time on topics they’re familiar with. The site has had published submissions from 2,300 authors, many of which maintain their own blogs as well. 73,000 articles have been published in the six years since launching. The site draws about 1 million unique monthly visitors who generate 3-4 million page views.
Authors maintain the copyright on their content and grant a perpetual license to Blogcritics.
Technorati will incorporate Blogcritics into its Technorati Media property, which is run by VP Publishing David White. The site already runs some Technorati ads. Over time most or all ad units will be through the Technorati ad network. Eric Olsen, the founder of Blogcritics, and Philip Win, the lead developer, will become Technorati employees.
Jalichandra says that they will likely acquire more content sites in the near future. He also made it clear that there will be a wall between the Media and Search properties, and that no favoritism will be shown to Blogcritics content.
I believe it’s actually spelt: Phillip Winn. Good news for BC, I know the team have worked very, very hard on the site over the last few years and deserve every success.
Only 1M? I’m surprised it would be for such a small figure given their numbers. Understand that’s just your guess, but would be interested to hear from others/anyone close to the deal…
Content is king. But I’m curious if technorati will start promoting their content blogs over others now. Does this signal an end to their trusted, independent authority on tech blogs?
-Robb
They might also consider the professional blogging networks corante.com and the multilingual blogging network creativeweblogging.com. Typepad just launched blogs.com as a guide to good blogs.
Mark Brooks
212-444-1636
http://www.soci...orkingwatch.com
Technorati has done some great things under Richard. Congrats to their team.
wow, that’s amazing news for Eric and Phillip. Congrats you guys. You deserve it. BC is an amazing site.
Technorati simply doesn’t work. Everyday my authority changes with no explanation, blogs than link to me appear and disappear, and so on. And search is… well, ineffective?
Thank you. I thought it was just me. Technorati’s inaccuracies/inconsistencies were driving me crazy, so I decided to stop checking the stats.
And about the acquisition, I am a Blogcritics contributor and I am wondering why I reading about it here first. Olsen could have had the decency to inform those of us who made him a rich man.
CWrite – you have a good point about being notified, but you lack class in your response.
I too am a contributor, and I’m very happy for Eric and Phillip. Theirs has been a nearly thankless task these years. This is awesome.
CWrite, you’ll be hearing from Eric, Phillip and Lisa soon. To ensure confidentiality during a deal process, it’s very common to announce acquisitions to the public before sharing to all employees and stakeholders. For example, our employees only found out this morning. In any case, you’ll hear the details soon.
How does this comment lack class? I haven’t seen enough about user-generated startups exploiting writers desperate for “exposure” and then cashing in. Not that it was the BC model, necessarily, but that is the obvious perception. Seems like a good Arrington topic waiting to happen.
Klass -
This line here:
“Olsen could have had the decency to inform those of us who made him a rich man.”
Sorry, but it just seems disrespectful and a little whiney.
He didn’t hope to cash in while boosting the site’s archives?
Why would someone who writes for free be excited that the site they wrote for free on was just sold, and they aren’t getting their share?
Oh, that’s right, more “exposure”.
@Gonzalo
Yes, I have had a similar experience with the whipsawing of my authority. Plunging and rising in the period of a week. My stats, however, have remained consistent, so that is what I pay attention to.
This week the blogs that link to me are my own posts!!
Congrats to the guys at BlogCritics and Technorati. The sales number seems awfully low though at just $1 million.
http://kreuzer33.wordpress.com
BlogCritics needs a makeover, hope Technorati can jazz it up.
Technorati as a website and service is a joke; their data and reliability is horrible. Hopefully they decide to devote more attention to improving technorati.com, because I and lots of other folks have since switched to Google. or just abandon technorati.com completely.
Phillip Winn , is sexy as hell. My pants are going crazy !!!
the technorati game is all over the place. yikes
No way they would of put 6 years worth of work and sold out for just $1m you could earn that in a job without the pressure……..i think you have forgot to add the zero on the end….
Thanks for all the great feedback – both the positive and negative comments – and let me share a few clarifying thoughts.
First, our biggest rationale for this partnership is that BlogCritics and Technorati have a shared vision – to help bloggers and people who read blogs. By partnering with BlogCritics, Technorati gets much closer to a large community of bloggers and people that read blogs. We hope to learn much more directly from bloggers and blog readers, but also potentially form business relationships with bloggers via Technorati Media, the ad network we launched in June.
Second, we want to make absolutely clear that we will always be transparent about which content on our network is algorithmically generated vs. what editorially contributed. We will never artificially seed or favor our own content into our natural search results.
Third, we have totally heard the feedback over the past year about quality issues about our search, and are actively engaged in several big search initiatives. Over the past year, we’ve dramatically increased the speed of Technorati.com over the past year; the site is nearly 2.5 times faster than it was a year ago. Last week, we launched a new crawler that should dramatically reduce spam and increase accuracy of the index. Further, we’re in the process of completely overhauling and updating our search infrastructure by the end of the year. Lastly, mid-Q4 will see a refresh of Technorati.com that emphasizes blog search more than we ever have.
Overall, we’ve made tremendous progress as a company in the past year. Are we there yet? No, we have much work to do. That said, we’re making huge efforts to improve the quality of our service, and just as importantly, build a great business.
Thank you for the comments here Richard, it is really good to know you are working on significant improvements to the search technology which does tend to be glitchy quite often. But as a Technorati Media publisher I know that Technorati is a brand that can be trusted and I am sure the acquisition is a great thing for BlogCritics.
What’s a Technorati?
I think they had a great team and they did a lot of success under Richard’ time …