Sunday, February 06, 2005

Bloglines... SOLD to Ask Jeeves

I always wondered how web-based feed aggregating service Bloglines made any revenue. I mean any. Although there is an Advertise Here link, I couldn't find any ads. There didn't seem like there was a way to for the site to make money. Other 'free' services that boggled my mind was Google SMS and also Blogger. I figured the latter two our, though. Google SMS solidifies Google's dominance in the search market. Google's POP access to Gmail does the same thing. They have great products and give you some free accessories to the core service.

Bloglines was started by the former CEO of the company ONElist that eventually was bought out by Yahoo! and became YahooGroups. Well, it seems as if that this could be his business model. Build an unbeatable product, and even if you can't find a way to make money from it, another site will use it to build the value of their overall service. I was thinking that after all these years, I'd actually be using Ask Jeeves again. Although it operates several sites independently including myway.com (again, a site with no banners, no pop-ups), iwon.com, and excite.com, among others, Bloglines is actually going to be fit into the Ask Jeeves' search portal, according to Napsterization.

Interestingly, the blogger who broke this story Saturday morning says this news won't be announced until Monday (now Tuesday). ASKJ closed at around 25.39 (down 1.55) on Friday due to mixed reviews of their Q4 report. They're growing fast but just not as fast as Google and this is why in the previously linked article, an analyst says it's undervalued. I'll close how she closed:
Also, I'm sure Jeeves is asking himself how I know this. I learned it from a couple of folks. Once that happened, it seemed reasonable to blog it.

SOURCE: Napsterization via The RSS Weblog

No comments: