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.
Rob Lewis
Rob is the President of Techvibes Media Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of Techvibes.com.
His diverse background includes stints in International Trade Finance, Web Development, and Enterprise Software and he is a graduate of the University of British Columbia, British Columbia Institute of Technology, and Simon Fraser University.
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