The following overview is pretty much a carbon copy of what made IGN Entertainment merge with Gamespy and roll up Rottentomatoes, TeamXbox, etc.
Tech Crunch says the merger fell through, citing personality clashes between Jeremy Wright (whom I’ve spoken to via phone here or there) and Richard Jalichandra, who was the VP at IGN who was our point of contact when my old company sold to IGN.
Can I imagine Richard and Jeremy not getting along? Sure. But beyond that, matching a technology company like technorati to a media company like B5 Media is not all that wise because Technorati’s credibility would take a hit if they owned some of the blogs they are indexing. If Google owned a bunch of sites, people would say WTF, no?
Also, not to be too negative on blogs… but while I think B5’s strategy of being diversified is a good one (unlike tech blogs who focus on one category), there’s a very big difference between what IGN did and what Technorati was aiming to do here.
Anyway, regardless of the outcome, it will be interesting to see if this shotgun marriage will pan out. Why shotgun? Tech Crunch suggests neither company is mustering enough demand for a follow-up financing round…
I can think of 2-3 better M&A fits for each company, but last time I gave some feedback to IGN it wasn’t exactly embraced, so I won’t start giving Richard unsolicited advice now.
As a side note, Erick Schonfeld is a pro and all, but Tech Crunch could have done a better job of mentioning that B5 Media is an indirect competitor to Tech Crunch (by way of being a blog network) and that his colleague Duncan Riley was a founder of B5 Media who got pushed out - and felt backstabbed, no less - from the company. Why? Leaving that out leaves one to think this was a deal that was about to happen and this was a way to derail those talks. But then again, no one likes a good conspiracy theory as much as I do.
I guess in that context, I should state: HipMojo.com is a blog within the BloggerMojo.com network of blogs, which loosely compete with those… already mentioned my relationship to Jalichandra above, the man helped me make some coin.
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