After much speculation (including a blog post I wrote yesterday), Yahoo finally acquired MyblogLog for $12- $10-million, according to Om Malik. Obviously, Yahoo put MyBlogLog in play last month when the rumors of its interest started to percolate. Of course, it didn’t hurt MyBlogLog’s M&A prospects that its social networking/community tool started to gain a lot of momentum in recent weeks judging by the number of widgets that started to pop up on peoples’ blogs. To be clear, MyBlogLog has some interesting features but it’s not much of a business given its only source of revenue is a statistics package that costs $3 a month or $25 a year, which competes against free services such as Google Analytics, Performancing and Sitemeter.
Yahoo is proving be an even better dream-maker for Web 2.0 start-ups than Google given the number of small acquisitions (Flicker, Blo.gs, Bix, Jumpcut). The question is what is Yahoo going to do with all these different pieces other than try to drive these users to other Yahoo services? And whatever happened to the Peanut Butter Manifesto?
Update: Om Malik has more details here. For some insight into MyBlogLog’s revenue potential and traffic, Fred Wilson had some thoughts last month. Mathew Ingram wonders out loud what Yahoo intends to do with MyBlogLog, which he highlights raised zero venture capital.
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You know, I believe this is some form of “business bloat”, like software and “feature bloat” it slows down business objects until they end up moving at a titanic pace *cough* microsoft *cough*. Google is doing the same thing, but unlike Yahoo, I still believe Google has a plan for its range of products even if we don’t see it yet.
However, if you look at Google’s history, they really made their mark by being focused on one thing and doing it well. That is how they got to where they are now and growth exploded. But now both Yahoo and Google are beginning to be too big for their own good.
It seems to be the way the big search companies are operating these days. As for the peanut butter, it was probably marginalized with strawberry jam and then eaten… never to be seen again.
Maybe all these little, cool start-ups are impossible to resist given they operate in the same eco-system (Silicon Valley, conferences, VCs) as Google and Yahoo.
Mark,
I’d be curious to know what percentage of traffic MyBlogLog generates for blogs that embed their widget.
I ran the numbers on my blog and found that MyBlogLog was accountable for 6 percent of my unique visitors. Is that a large percentage? I’d say it’s fairly substantial, given all it took was a quick registration and a little bit of pasting some code on my Wordpress sidebar widgets.
Here’s the rest of my post-
http://zenrob.com/2007/01/01/how-communities-and-widgets-drive-traffic/
Rob,
I think 6% is a pretty impressive number given it’s probably all new traffic that’s coming from the MyBlogLog widget. I think that’s one of the more interesting part of the widget because not only does it identify who’s visiting your blog but it also gives people a tool to check out other blogs.
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[...] Mark Evans has posted that Yahoo! officially acquired MyBlogLog for $12 million. MyBlogLog is website that started out as a metrics service, but has since made its mark on the blogosphere by adding unique social features. [...]
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