Video ad network VideoEgg has announced that it has agreed to acquire blogging pioneer Six Apart, the company behind TypePad and Moveable Type. As part of the acquisition, both companies will drop their names and be renamed SAY Media.
Six Apart, founded in 2001 by Ben and Mena Trott, is one the pioneers of blogging. Its Moveable Type platform brought blog publishing to the masses. Not long after, the company launched TypePad, the blog hosting service based upon the Moveable Type platform. Six Apart has had a long history in Silicon Valley and was even once the owner of Livejournal when it acquired its parent company in 2005. In recent years though, Six Apart has been more focused on its advertising business.
VideoEgg, which launched at the DEMO Conference in 2005, originally was a video publishing service, but has since rebranded itself as an advertising network. It owns Twig, the “unavoidable online ad” that landed on Typepad last year.
The new SAY Media will focus on its advertising network. It claims that advertising technology has not kept up with changes in media. SAY Media’s platform, in the company’s view, is the answer for advertisers that want to reach audiences through modern media.
VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez will become the CEO of the new entity, while Six Apart CEO Chris Alden is leaving the company. Six Apart co-founder Mena Trott will join the company’s board of directors.
The Future of Moveable Type
While Moveable Type and TypePad were among the first of their kind, WordPress has clearly won the battle for blogging platform supremacy. It shouldn’t come as a suprise that Mashable’s readers overwhelmingly chose WordPress over TypePad as their preferred platform.
SAY Media says that it will continue to support Moveable Type and TypePad, but forgive us if we’re skeptical that will last. The new entity is clearly focused on building out a new-age advertising network, not on building out a blogging platform to compete with WordPress or Tumblr.
From what we’ve seen before, we bet it won’t take long for resources to be allocated towards the advertising network and away from Moveable Type. It will be the beginning of the degradation of a platform that has already lost much of its relevance, despite hosting The Huffington Post and major blogs from ABC, the BBC and others.
Advertising is where the money is for this new organization. While we don’t expect Moveable Type or TypePad to go anywhere for a long time, we doubt anything new or innovative will come out of them, either.
More About: acquisition, advertising, advertising network, Moveable Type, SAY Media, six apart, typepad, videoegg
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