Ask Jeeves Possibly Paid Between $30 and $50 Million for Bloglines
In a sure sign of a maturing, profitable marketplace, Jupiter Research’s Gary Stein has speculated that the sale price of RSS reader site Bloglines to Ask Jeeves was between $35 and $50 million. This compared to Google’s purchase of Pyra Labs, the company behind the highly successful Blogger service, which was rumoured at the time to be worth around $7.5 million US Dollars.
From Gary:
BlogLines (and others offering similar services) present a new way for users to find and consume content on the Web, which is precisely the mission of a search engine. Plus, BlogLines has a ton of very loyal subscribers.
This long-term view, though, hinges on whether or not Jeeves paid a good prices. Scheming with someone-who-would-know (from his experience, not from any insider knowledge), we figured that the only way to price Jeeves would be based on users and the time they spend (plus any proprietary technology and owned-assets, of course). The rough figure he threw out was around $35-50 million. Sounds reasonable.
If true, the price indicates a growing value placed on Blog related firms as interest in the growing blogging market place continues to rise.
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Guest Columnist Duncan Riley is the Editor of Blog Herald, more blog news more often.
