Continuing a Friday full of rumors and little real news, TechCrunch is reporting that blog search engine Technorati is going to shift its focus towards becoming a blog advertising network:
Through a variety of sources we’ve confirmed that Technorati is making plans for a major shift in it’s going forward strategy, and is also considering a number of corporate development transactions.
First, they’ve been pitching venture capitalists on another round of financing. That’s not surprising - their last round, $10.5 million, was in June 2006. The company has raised a total of just over $20 million, and given that they have 25 employees, it’s time for another round. But we’ve also heard that they’ve hired Montgomery & Co. to shop the company to buyers, simultaneous to their funding pitches.
If this turns out to be true, it would be an interesting development and probably a smart move by Technorati. Technorati has been through some tough times lately and none of their new products were very useful and/or gathered much mindshare. And even their old core business of blog search is not getting much attention anymore.
As a blog search engine, Technorati has clearly lost market share to Google’s blog search, but it does sit upon a wealth of information. As Michael Arrington rightly points out in his post, Technorati tags are still being used by pretty much every blogger and they would be a great way for Technorati to target ads.
Frederic,
Thanks for posting this. I hope the features that we’re working on will prove to be more valuable than the releases we’d had that were disappointing. Please keep letting us know what you would like to see from us.
best regards,
-Ian
Technorati
nice article! nice site. you're in my rss feed now
keep it up