Six Apart to Buy LiveJournal?
Om Malik, in an exclusive post, claims to have first-hand knowledge that Six Apart will be acquiring LiveJournal later this month for an undisclosed sum. If both parties follow through then it will make Six Apart one of the largest blogging companies in the world.
EXCLUSIVE: Folks have been predicting a big year for mergers and acquisitions in 2005, and 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.
Makes you wonder what exactly Six Apart will be doing with the assets acquired from this deal. I do not foresee them killing off the LiveJournal codebase by replacing it with what they use on TypePad but you never know. At least we now have a small idea how Six Apart plans to use some of that venture capital they recently received in a new round of financing. I am looking at this with caution even though the two companies are probably somewhat of a natural fit.
If this is how 2005 is to begin then I can only imagine where the blogosphere will be by the years end.
Just what we need, Six Apart getting more of a monopoly. I wish I wasn’t so trained in movabletype and had the time to sit down and learn Word Press. I loved movabletype when I first started with it, but now Six Apart are just too greedy and I feel like I am just feeding a giant by using it.