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Were Techmeme and Sphere too greedy?
Kara Swisher at All Things D reports that Yahoo has acquired a blog aggregator — or “meme-tracker” — called Buzztracker for the bargain price of $5-million or so. Not a bad payout for a site that appears to have been founded and run by a couple of guys. Co-founder and CEO Alan Warms, who is a friend of VC Fred Wilson’s, becomes general manager of Yahoo News.
I have to confess that while I have heard of Buzztracker, it seems like a distant also-ran in the meme-tracker game. I check Techmeme.com religiously because it is by far the best (most timely, least spam-filled, most efficient at finding new blog posts that are on topic, etc.), and also check Tailrank and Sphere from time to time, but have never paid much attention to Buzztracker. And I don’t think I’m alone in those habits.
Which raises the question: Why did Yahoo buy Buzztracker and not any of those other sites? It’s possible that Yahoo isn’t all that bright, and just picked the first meme-tracker with a cute name, or figured that $5-million is about what Terry Semel blows on the corporate jet every year, so what the heck.
Or it could be that Alan Warms struck someone at Yahoo as a good GM for Yahoo News, as Kara suggests in her story (the head of Yahoo’s media group apparently reconnected with Warms at the D5 conference but says he has known him for years). But from what Kara says, it also sounds as though some of the other players in the space wanted too much money:
“Yahoo had looked at other better-known competitors in the space, such as the San Francisco-based Sphere… but those trendier (and more popular) startups apparently had too lofty valuations.”
Of course, it’s possible that some of them jacked the price up because they didn’t want to be acquired by Yahoo, but didn’t want to say no :-) The bigger question, of course, is whether Yahoo plans to integrate meme-tracking into Yahoo News somehow, or just keep it as a sideline the way Netscape is with Propeller. TDavid takes a look at how Buzztracker stacks up to Google News here.
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mesh
busted tees
Remember for a short time anyway, Yahoo put blogger coverage next to their search results. What happened to that? There isn’t anything I can see about Blogtracker that is worth paying $5m for (see signature link for full review).
Yahoo continues to make bad decisions. This one falls on Jerry Yang. Wonder what other also rans he’ll be buying in his 100 day plan?
It’s funny though how Yahoo has some killer properties under their umbrella in Flickr and Delicious, not to mention hiring the guy who wrote Firebug. Yahoo Pipes is actually pretty cool.
They need to spread the mojo, and learn from their successful startups and apply that everywhere.
I think Techmeme is worth more than $5 million. But the fact that Yahoo is now out of the market for Techmeme maybe knocks their valuation down some - and by extension the other News 2.0 players.
What’s a “meme-tracker”?
Good one, Gabe :-)
Yay, another property for Yahoo to not integrate. Prepare to watch Buzztracker do more or less the same thing it always has for the next three years!
From what I can tell from Gabe’s approach to Techmeme, it would be a major surprise if he actually decided to sell it. My take is he’s pretty happy running his own business for the time being.
Mark
I didn’t see a trackback URL so here’s a manual one. I quoted your view of Techmeme in my BuzzTracker roundup, linked to Yodel Anecdotal in support of the “hiring” theory, and excerpted a few other points I found. Sort of a manual meme track (i.e. not very scalable!).
Thanks, Scott. I turned off trackbacks because I was getting way too much spam.