Directly from Om Malik’s inside sources, Om discusses Six Apart’s imminent purchase of LiveJournal. In his own words:
The deal is a mix of stock and cash, and could be announced sometime later this month, according to those close to the two companies. If the deal goes through, then Six Apart will become one of the largest weblog companies in the world, with nearly 6.5 million users.
Obviously I can’t speak for Six Apart, but I can speculate as to their reasoning behind the purchase 🙂
- The added user base now gives them a massive market to advertise in front of. I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a new “free” TypePad plan that included advertisements in all blogs in order to keep it free. Then they could port all LJ users over to the new TP plan, and the increased advertising revenue would be tremendous.
- They forego the free plan, and hope that even a small percentage of LJ users move to the cheapest TypePad plan. This might be difficult, because a miniscule percentage of LJ users currently pay any money at all, so they might just bail.
- They don’t combine services, don’t require any users to pay anything, and generally just keep LJ and TypePad/6A separate entities. Then the engineering team could work on moving LJ users over to the TypePad architecture without adjusting anything.
Either way, this is an interesting move that could have lots of possibilities in the near future. We can’t wait to see.
It seems as though the rumors were true, and Six Apart did indeed purchase LiveJournal from Danga, their parent company. Read more about the LiveJournal side of the acquisition, Mena’s thoughts on it, and a FAQ to answer some of the burning questions.
