Six Apart to buy Live Journal

I use both of these systems, more Movabletype than Livejournal these days, but interesting news nonetheless.

Six Apart to buy Live Journal:
we are starting the year with a bang. I have learnt exclusively that Six Apart, the parent company behind hosted blogging service TypePad, and Moveable Type is about to acquire Live Journal, for an undisclosed amount. 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. It also gives the company a very fighting chance against Google’s Blogger and Microsoft’s MSN Spaces.
...Live Journal was started by Brad Fitzpatrick back in 1999, long before Six Apart existed and blogging was all the rage. Live Journal, which is based in Portland, Oregon has 5.5 million users, though only a miniscule number are paying customers. Live Journal is very popular with teenagers and is built on an open source platform, and arguably is one of the largest open source projects on the web. Live Journal has been in talks with several other possible acquirers, though Six Apart is more of a natural fit. My sources tell me that all Live Journal employees are going to be retained.

update: NYT: News Item

Six Apart, the maker of Movable Type, software for publishing Web logs, said that it had acquired Danga Interactive, which operates the popular blogging site LiveJournal.com.
New York Times: Business 1/5/05 11:00 PM David F. Gallagher (NYT)

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Seth A. published on January 5, 2005 10:36 AM.

Trackback spam was the previous entry in this blog.

Sugar Association To Counter-Attack 'Sugar Bashing' is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Pages

Powered by Movable Type 4.37