...by AskJeeves, which is among the 5 search engines out there. The decision will most likely be announced on Tuesday. Does it mean it's the beginning for exit for the 3-4 years ago visionaries who developed weblog-related products? It certainly means the start for blogs going mainstream anyways, I wonder what it will be next. Still, there's a lot of vertical integration to be made around.
UPDATE: I was of course curious about the figures behind the deal. Marc has the scoop: "The house pool says soemthing like $15M-$20M - but others say they'll take the $8M being offered them by Accel. But Stewart and Caterina don't GET the $8M, that would go into the company."
I bet $15-$20M is the asking price but let's get real here, Bloglines is hot, but it's not that hot and it has strong competition out there. On the other hand $8M seems realistic and I'm thinking of the $10M funding that TypePad got based on MovableType. You know I got no formal education in venture capitalism but I judge the amounts by the level of popularity of the product. Clearly this is not a buy based on profits but its motive would more likely be to supply a value added service to existing "customers".
Radu
I doubt that the development of such a tool would take longer than a month or two, and Ask Jeeves can very easily build it in house. The transaction value here though deosnot come from the system per se but the archives, or the weblog databases, which apparently are more difficult to spider and index given the different customizing level of each weblog tool. Hence Ask Jeeves search engine would get more relevance. The userbase is also an important element, even though apparently the switching costs may seem low - I have tried myself a dozen of RSS readers and I found it tiring to see and learn the same thing under a different form all over again) Consequently the price pretty much depends on the users number and database size - I have no idea whether the $8 mil. is realistic or not since i have no data - it will be released soon since Ask Jeeves is a public company. However it is quite difficult for coming up with a value since there's no comparable transactions. Other techniques might have involved calculating revenue multiples or the ol' discounted cash flow model. My guess is that the negotiation started from figure including a combination of revenue multiples and a userbase/archive quantification. And btw, this is not "venture capitalism", it's a simply corporate finance exercise usually done by anybody in the investment area. VCs are simply in this area - they represent a class of investors looking for (more riskier usually) opportunities, under (of course) specific circumstances. No more, no less.