Six Apart Buying Live Journal?
from the bigger,-badder-and-why? dept
Om Malik claims to have it on good authority that Six Apart is in the process of buying Live Journal. If it's true, it's an interesting move. Many people have been wondering exactly where Six Apart fits into the market. While they offer software for your own server, it's clear that they've been paying much more attention to the TypePad hosting service -- which faced some form of competition from the various free sites, including Blogger and Live Journal. TypePad has been able to get more users by offering additional features and more control than free sites, but still at cheaper rates than hosting your site separately and installing the software yourself. Faced with some amount of competition from Google, MSN and AOL (and, probably Yahoo at some point), it looks like Six Apart decided they needed to get into the numbers game to show that, somehow, they had more bloggers than the others -- and Live Journal gives them that point. However, it's not clear how much Live Journal users have in common with TypePad users. The two seem to attract very different audiences. While that might mean they've just expanded their market, they've expanded it mainly with people who aren't interested in paying, and who seem less likely to move up the scale than users from other blogging services. Either way, it looks like, as we kick off 2005, we're already facing "blog consolidation." If this deal does happen, it will be interesting to see what Six Apart does with all those Live Journal users. With the growth of contextual advertising (see what Google has done with Blogger for reference), it wouldn't be surprising if they hope to leverage all those sites for advertising rather than pushing them towards subscription services.
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Livejournal has a good amount of payign members. I don't know the ratio but plenty of people pay to make the company profitable and growing, and introducing more pay services over time.
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LJ paying accounts
A lot of other interesting data on the statistics page, too.
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So, I'm at a loss to understand your complaint now.
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