Blog search engine (and more recently blog/social network advertising network) Technorati has raised a new round of financing – $2 million from existing investors, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital.
This is, the company says, an extension of their Series D round from June 2008, where they raised $7.5 million at a roughly $35 million valuation. The company has raise a total of just over $32 million to date (much of that at a much higher valuation).
The company is also in the process of raising additional capital via commercial debt, we’ve heard separately but haven’t confirmed.
This funding should get the company to profitability, says CEO Richard Jalichandra. He won’t say what revenues are, except that it has more than doubled each of the last two years. He also points out that Technorati’s network, with 25 million monthly unique U.S. visitors, is now the 5th largest social media property on the Internet.
In addition to its flagship site, Technorati supplies advertising to 450 or so websites – about half blogs, half niche social networks.
It’ll be interesting to see where they take this new found dough – the advertising sector seems to be picking up again, slowly..
They’re still kickin’ huh? I was worried, with the lack of updates to some parts of the Technorati site. Good to see ‘em heading to profitability, they deserve it.
Their rankings haven’t changed in weeks now. And according to an email we received, Technorati.com is a very insignificant part of their business
Richard is a great CEO and has been doing a good job of steering that company through an inevitable change of course, congrats to him and the team on all their continued progress.
Are these VCs sure they are not burning their hands? Because practically i dont see much growth in Technorati over the next few years?
cool
Their authority rating and ranking system is very biased. If you are located outside SF Bay area you get a lower score.
The website copying our content get a better score than our original content.
Look in the ‘Reactions’ with compiled blogs having higher scores:
http://technora...plorer.com/blog
Go figure how good their system works: outdated !
Nice to see some positive news about Technorati. 25mm UU is huge!
Interesting…can’t say I really understand Technorati’s business model.
But if as mentioned above (by Zee) that “Technorati.com is a very insignificant part of their business”, then things become a bit less muddled…
I wish them well…
business model is mo funding, mo funding, mo funding. same with fadbook and twittle. it works well and if it aint broke dont fix it.
One thing that should be pointed out is that they are getting into the content generation side of things directly with a vengeance. Those of you who know BlogCritics.org know the model. They even use Scrive, the same content management system that BlogCritics.org uses. They sign up writers who write for free and as part of the article submission process you are asked to include one or more Amazon ASINs (obviously for affiliate commissions for Technorati). Sure it’s akin to “pay to play” for both bands and now amazingly startups who want to see VC’s, but for a new blogger/writer it’s worth it to gain exposure so they’ll have hordes of writers banging at their door.
I know Alexa rankings are all over the map, but combine the above affiliate based content generation process with their having a whopping Alexa ranking of 641 (today) which is close to what TechCrunch has (540), a home page rank of 9 according to Google (TechCrunch has 8), and it is easy to see how they can make plenty off of selling ads too and other revenue generation possibilities.
In short, I think they’re going to make plenty of cash and understimating them is a bad idea.
For the rightfully skeptical in this day and age, except for submitting one article to them (unpaid), I don’t work for them nor do I have any other affiliation with them except for having registered my blog with them. Also, my cat has firm plans to take over planet Earth and turn all of you into cookie dough.
I hope Technorati survives. They played a big role in blogosphere and will go to internet history for all they’ve done.
Good comments with two of my own. First, thanks for the nice ones! Always appreciate the thoughtful ones. Second, I want to clarify our business model quickly. We run an ad network and three of our own sites (technorati.com, blogcritics.org and twittorati.com). Launched 15 months ago, the ad network has grown into the 5th largest social media property and the largest ad network focused on social media (Mike links to the comScore rankings on my blog). Our three sites are in fact not “insignificant” parts of our business but rather very important components of the network – they’re our link to social media content creators with 1.3m registered users on technorati and a community of 3,500 active authors on blogcritics. Our model is often misunderstood or viewed as one part vs. the actual whole, but it’s relatively simple: an ad network focused on social media, the world’s largest blog search engine and directory, a large and passionate author community, and our newest site which tracks the tweets of the most influential bloggers.
on the same day that they announce closure of the Japan office…
http://www.tech...vice_close.html
“the ad network has grown into the 5th largest social media property”
myspace, facebook, twitter = social media property
technorati ad network = ad network
just because someone at ComScore puts you site into a category doesn’t make it so