Less than three years after it acquired LiveJournal, San Francisco-based blogging software company, SixApart has decided to sell the business to a Russian group, SUP. SixApart is the company behind well known publishing platforms, TypePad and MoveableType. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The sale of LiveJournal shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. LiveJournal founder and lifeforce Brad Fitzpatrick recently left SixApart to pursue other opportunities. He currently works for Google.
In a statement, SixApart said that it will continue to represent LiveJournal to advertisers and partners for 12-months. SUP will establish a US operation to manage LiveJournal globally. SUP had licensed LiveJournal from SixApart in October 2006 permitting SUP to manage LiveJournal in Russia. The Russian LiveJournal community is second only to the U.S. in number of accounts. There are about 14 million Live Journal users. SUP now represents 28% of the total LiveJournal monthly audience.
I got in touch with Edward Shenderovich, Head of Strategic Development at SUP and asked him why his company decided to buy LiveJournal. He emailed this response.
We believe it’s a good business. In the world now dominated by social networks, the role of a “community platform” holds a very special place. We have some ideas about new functionality, new partnerships, and some interesting monetization opportunities. We are very excited about the progress we had made in Russia in the last 6 months and look forward to replicate some of our success worldwide.
18 comments so far
7:21 PM PT
[...] Six Apart selling LiveJournal to SUP, a Russian media firm. My reaction to the news was similar to Om Malik’s. The sale of LiveJournal shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. LiveJournal founder and [...]
8:07 PM PT
[...] TechCrunch - GigaOM Prohibida su copia total con o sin fines comerciales. Copias parciales deben citar la fuente. [...]
8:19 PM PT
That’s the best buyer they could find?
10:00 PM PT
Well I’m actually kind of confused with this deal.We know change can be scary, even if it’s a good change.Russian company buying LJ, given Russian servers’ problems with viruses and the like.
If i can recollect there were a lot of embedded viruses in there, so it that LJ is going to get migrated to Russian servers. Silly must say !
Well Anyways ALA SUP’s get their priorities straight: their number one goal is to make sure all of you who are current LiveJournal users are happy, and to make LiveJournal better than ever before.
Parul
http://www.bhopu.com
10:15 PM PT
[...]“It’s about our desire at Six Apart to really do right by the LiveJournal product and to have it have as strong of a future as possible. SUP will be able to invest (in LiveJournal) in 2008 more than Six Apart would have. Likewise, we’ll be able to invest more in our three properties than we would have.” — Six Apart CEO Chris Alden[...]
12:33 AM PT
[...] LiveJournal sold - just like some meat wagon. Bran fed, Grade A, choice cuts. Exploiting customers is in. How much did it go for? Rafat is right - the only place SixApart makes money - is in it’s enterprise sales. [...]
9:19 AM PT
[...] on GigaOm there are details from Edward Shenderovich, Head of Strategic Development at SUP, on why they [...]
9:37 AM PT
I have posted how much they paid for it on http://ru.blognation.com
9:53 AM PT
hey Om -
do some more digging on this. no one’s put together the real story on SixApart yet, and there’s certainly a bigger picture piece to be told (with #’s, strategy, exec profiles, etc).
isn’t this territory that needs to be covered?
6A isn’t a fly-by-night company, but they’ve flown under the radar of either strong praise or criticism for far too long.
as a user & fan of TypePad (and to a lesser extent Vox), i’m flabbergasted something hasn’t happened in their space. Yahoo & SixApart would seem like a perfect marriage, why hasn’t it happened? (2 years ago, for that matter?)
there’s got to be more there there.
1:07 PM PT
2 Parul Bindra:
Yeh, russian servers are full of viruses and we also have bears wandering in data rooms.
Big scary hairy bears… ;)
Best regards,
Alex Parkhomenko
1:56 PM PT
[...] Apart, purveyors of blogging platforms such as Movable Type, TypePad and VOX, sold LiveJournal (LJ) to SUP, a Russian online media company. The move comes less than three years after Six Apart [...]
6:33 PM PT
Will Google sell Orkut to a Brazilian company?
This does seem like an odd announcement. What is the “rest of the story”? As someone mentioned, the buyer seems more like the sort of nothing company that would be a seller to a more known company, not a buyer from a more known company.
Or were the Live Journal members just too much of a bunch of jerks for Six Apart’s customer support to handle?
Did Six Apart need funds, and the next round would have diluted the Trotts out of company control, so they decided to sell off assets while they wait for the elusive acquisition?
At any rate, there is some story here that is not being told.
6:39 PM PT
‘interesting monetization opportunities’ sounds ominous. Currently LJ has an opt-out system for displaying advertisements on free journals. I expect that will be the first thing to go.
10:23 PM PT
[...] SixApart Sells LiveJournal To A Russian Group (tags: livejournal internet russia business social technology blog) Popularity: unranked [?] This entry was written by del.icio.us/px, posted on 2007.12.04 at 11:23 pm MST, filed under uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. « So the surgery went swell and … [...]
9:41 AM PT
incredible 6a does nothing from LJ… which was social adhead when 6a bough t it! they loose all their time to develop vox which is already dead vs FB and myspace…
6:37 AM PT
[...] said that it will continue to represent LiveJournal to advertisers and partners for 12-months. ⇒ Ah oh. If I was a regular LJ user, this might have me a little worried. Tags: blogging friends , [...]
2:10 PM PT
[...] be alienated labor. Which we all know– that’s why everyone gets into a tizzy when, say, LiveJournal changes hands again or Rupert Murdoch buys MySpace. Because when users switch from “people using a service” [...]
3:44 AM PT
[...] can’t say that I had much joy when reading the news of SUP taking over the whole of LiveJournal back in December. There is something fishy about SUP [...]
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