A couple months ago there was a
rumor that Yahoo had purchased MyBlogLog for about $10 million. It turned out to be
not true. Now Forbes.com
reports that Yahoo has purchased MyBlogLog for real. Yahoo has confirmed it but won't say what they paid for it.
MyBlogLog helps add social networking and community features to blogs. It also provides blog statistics.
Yahoo is not saying what it paid for Mybloglog, but knowledgeable sources said it cost a little over $10 million for the company, which first offered the service in July. Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy at Yahoo, said Mybloglog will likely remain branded as a separate entity, but Yahoo users will be able to register on it with their Yahoo password. The reader communities will soon be able to access Yahoo services, like the Flickr photo site or the Yahoo Answers information service, to their groups.
"This closes the loop between readers and publishers," he said. "Every publisher wants to know his readers, and the readers want to find out about each other. It's the power of implicit networking."
Web advertisers, of course, want to know about everybody. Mybloglog is currently available on about 45,000 blogs, according to company chairman Scott Rafer, and has registered the photos and personal information (like the address of their blogs) of about 33,000 readers. Rafer also said it looks at about 1 million readers of blogs a day. Its most popular blogs are, not surprisingly, on technology subjects, but also on real estate – making the user information valuable to multiple advertisers.
Like the
Flickr purchase this is also a smart acquisition by Yahoo. MyBlogLog is a service that is growing in popularity -- it is being added to more and more blogs. We recently added the MyBlogLog widget to this blog. You can see it -- and some of the recent visitors to our blog -- on the right side of the
permalink for this blog post and on the bottom left side of our
homepage. MyBlogLog also maintains a
blog where you can read about new features and problems -- like
spam. Spam seems to be the one problem no company can avoid.
Yahoo has also
blogged about the MyBlogLog acquisition on Yodel Anecdotal.
