journal de bord

08 h 24

End of Six Apart

2010-say-media.

We are a new kind of media network that is reinventing the online advertising experience for brands. Driven by technology and entirely focused on delivering quantifiable attention, we offer the creation, delivery, optimization and measurement of brand advertising experiences. The result is unprecedented scale and ROI for advertisers.

Videoegg [A WordPress powered site…].

Advertising network VideoEgg will acquire blogging and advertising network Six Apart, and the combined entity will be renamed Say Media. The companies will officially announce the transaction tomorrow. VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez will run the combined entity as CEO. Six Apart CEO Chris Alden will step down.

[…] The combined company will reach 345 million global unique visitors, says the company. These are direct visitors to hosted sites as well as third party sites running ads from the companies. The combined company will have over 300 employees, and “the vast majority of Six Apart employees will move over,” says Sanchez.

There have been rumors that some of Six Apart’s flagship products will be shut down. The company is shuttering Vox this month, for example. But Alden says that Say Media will continue to support and grow the Typepad and Moveable Type [sic] platforms.

Techcrunch: “VideoEgg Will Acquire Six Apart And Rename Itself SAY Media”.

Six Apart, founded in 2001 by Ben and Mena Trott, is one the pioneers of blogging. Its Movable Type platform brought blog publishing to the masses. Not long after, the company launched TypePad, the blog hosting service based upon the Movable 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.

[…] SAY Media says that it will continue to support Movable 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 Movable 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 Movable Type or TypePad to go anywhere for a long time, we doubt anything new or innovative will come out of them, either.

Mashable, Ben Parr: “Six Apart Is No More; What Will Happen to TypePad and Movable Type?”

MT5 is a real CMS for building websites, MT4 is a multi-blog platform. The two are different products, and both are excellent in their respective category. Michael has a point regarding the way Six Apart has communicated around Movable Type, or the lack of transition path. But it’s totally false that MT5 is an ill-conceived product.

People needing a purely blog-focused platform will find Melody interesting (and MT4 isn’t dead, yet). But those of us who also need a good, secure, versatile CMS that’s not a resource-hog, should appreciate MT5 for what it is and not confuse it with MT4.

François Nonnenmacher.

Melody = MT4. MT5 remains an entirely different product that the Melody folks seem to avoid totally, and I’m worried about that.

François Nonnenmacher, MTOS-dev mailing list.

L’avenir de Six Apart (et de Mena Trott) ne nous intéresse que pour ce qu’il induit pour MT5. Melody est un projet proche de la mort clinique, ou tout du moins dont les cycles sont apathiques.

Une prévision maison ? Movable Type va devenir purement japonais (là peut-être).

P.S.

In Tokyo, my team is operating Movable Type business with more than 400 sales partners including 10 large solution providers.

Movable Type is positioned as the #1 leading CMS software in this market, and all its clients as well as top bloggers are expecting us to evolve this software to be their future platform.

Six Apart KK ( the Tokyo office ) has a good enough reason to commit on the future development of Movable Type. We have engineering, QA and support team who have an experience since our first release of the internationalized version.

Jun Kaneko, MTOS-dev mailing list.