Techcrunch's Erick Schonfeld reported yesterday that merger talks between Technorati and Toronto's b5media have blown-up. According to his post (and a leaked Technorati PowerPoint slide), Technorati has been going down a new strategic path that included raising an additional round of financing and pitching VCs that it could turn itself into a blog advertising network and/or even pursue a blog roll-up strategy.
The talks with Toronto-based b5media (they’re big in Canada) indicate that it is taking the blog roll-up idea more seriously than we previously thought. If the merger with b5media had gone through, Technorati would have gained a network of 340 blogs. One of the slides in the pitch deck Technorati was showing potential investors (shown above) outlines how a roll-up strategy could be combined with an ad network. Technorati would use its search engine to promote owned-and-operated blogs. It would sell ads using its own sales force instead of third-party ad networks for an “immediate 30-50% revenue bump” and sell across its network.
b5media was #1 on our Toronto Start-Up Index for April which came out yesterday and CEO Jeremy Wright has been active in the comment thread. I'd love to get his comment on this piece of news.
