In Soviet Russia, Blog Writes You
Having blown its chance to develop LiveJournal into what could well have been an early Facebook, the site’s owner, Six Apart, agreed yesterday to sell it to Moscow-based online media company SUP.
Financial terms weren’t disclosed, though Kommersant reports the deal to be worth some $30 million. The sale comes about a year after Six Apart and SUP allied to bring LiveJournal to Russia, where the platform quickly gained a lot of traction. Today www.livejournal.ru accounts for 28% of LiveJournal’s overall audience. As SUP CEO Andrew Paulson once said, “LiveJournal is the ‘blogosphere’ in Russia.”
The acquisition, then, would appear to make perfect sense. Six Apart unburdens itself of a tiring distraction and SUP gears up to transform LiveJournal into what its previous owners could not. “This is pretty cool because [SUP is] ridiculously excited about LiveJournal, and [has] been for a while,” writes LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick. “They want to throw a lot of resources at LiveJournal in terms of product development and engineers. ‘LiveJournal.com, Inc.’ now stands alone again, focusing on nothing but LJ. “
