Six Apart announced today that it is selling LiveJournal, one of its four blog publishing platforms, to new-ish Russian web firm SUP. We've covered the story here, but what's the strategy here?
Six Apart bought LiveJournal in 2005, but the feisty userbase was an uncomfortable fit for Six Apart. There's a sense that Six Apart will be relieved to be handing LiveJournal over, but tellingly the price of the deal has not been disclosed.
LiveJournal has hit a seam in Russian in the same way Orkut has in Brazil, and Friendster in south-east Asia. Russia is a rapidly developing market, and SUP's strategy is to but up high-traffic sites that it can monetise through advertising. It already owns the news and sports site Champinat.ru, two web advertising business so the acquisition of LiveJournal fits for them.
comScore pulled out some data for me on how the different blogging markets globally, which highlights the interesting gap between local and global services.
Blog traffic worldwide: unique users October 2007
Source: comScore
So Google and Microsoft battling it out for the largest market share - no surprise there. But Wordpress is performing well, and SINA, blogs hosted by China's biggest news site, is the fifth largest blog platform in the world.
Breaking data out by country, China has an internet population of around 96 million, according to comScore. Around half those users accessed blogs during October - 47.3 million and SINA dominates the market. India has around 25 million web users and, again, Blogger dominates the market there. Brazil has 17 million and Russia 14 million.
Blog traffic in China: unique users October 2007
Source: comScore
Blog traffic in India: unique users October 2007
Source: comScore
Blog traffic in Brazil: unique users October 2007
Source: comScore
Blog traffic in Russia: unique users October 2007
Source: comScore
Visualising the traffic in this way shows a couple of things: the dominance of Six Apart and LiveJournal in Russia, and of Google's Blogger.com and Windows Live Spaces globally. Yahoo 360 barely gets a look-in in these developing areas, but will have a stronger audience base in the US.
And any acquisition targets here? Ibibo.com in India looks plump, but is owned by South African media giant Naspers. It's those longer tail, localised services that are the ones to watch.
Technorati Tags: Blogger, Google, LiveJournal, SixApart, SUP
