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It was announced late last night that Yahoo! has bought the blogging community and widget MyBlogLog. Although the agreed amount was not disclosed, a Forbes source claims an amount of over $10m was offered.
There has been surprisingly little reaction to this announcement in the forums, despite being a Highlighted Post at WebmasterWorld.
Rather than letting me ramble on about what MyBlogLog is, Danny has an extremely comprehensive write-up over at Search Engine Land.
What I'm most interested in however, is what value the community and widget site will offer Yahoo! at a very important stage of their battle with Google. Is this simply a case of seeing value in the community aspect of the site, or the fact that their widget for placing on your blog, gives them access to the same (if not more) information as a your web analytics package? If this data was fed into the main Yahoo! beast, it would offer insight into what users do when they reach a specific site; maybe even using the data to manipulate natural search and paid search results. As the widget would only feature on blogs, the data won't necessarily effect individual site, although still provides interesting user behaviour information.
Further discussion over at WebmasterWorld Forums.
Comments:
BostonScott
01/09/2007 11:59 pm
Well Yahoo has one of the largest and most loyal user bases (in terms of account holders)... if they promote this aggressively it will be interesting to see what a community like this can do with some real juice thrown into it. What I am curious about is what implication this can have on Yahoo! Search Marketing. If Yahoo builds the service up to the point where millions of people become active users... and integrates it within their toolbar, just think about the behavioral targeting one could do.
Scott Rafer
01/10/2007 02:24 am
Of all the analyses I've read, this is the one I'm going to hide behind: http://gigaom.com/2007/01/08/yahoo-buys-mybloglog-for-real/#comment-518788
Beloy
01/12/2007 07:57 pm
The purchasing improves position of Yahoo in blogging sector. With Yahoo's half a billion users, they are looking for SIMPLE yet attractive solutions. Don't forget many users of the biggest search engine are PEOPLE, - with their own interests in mind. I joined MyBlogLog 3 days ago to introduce the BILLION Dollar Homepage http://Mini-News.com , - first website in the world made mostly of IFRAME ads! Yahoo would be shocked to learn that its FIRST 3Kb of Live IFRAME Ad space is now on eBay for only $100.