Yahoo offers Movable Type for bloggers
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. and Six Apart Ltd., creator of Movable Type — the most popular software used to create professional blogs — said on Sunday Yahoo will be the preferred supplier of Movable Type for small businesses.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Six Apart deal lands days after a flurry of Yahoo moves aimed at user-created content: the [[relationships confirm]] acquisition of social bookmarking service del.icio.us on December 11 and the rebranding of Konfabulator, bought in August, as Yahoo! Widgets — with Yahoo citing strong organic usage growth for the widgets product. It also follows Yahoo's announcement of plans for an online library of books.
Yahoo enters the partnership from strength: a market research firm ranks it first among portals in unique visitors, which is precisely why Six Apart — maker of Movable Type, described as the most popular software for professional blogs — would hand it preferred-supplier status for small businesses. The pickup by Dave Winer's Scripting News and Yahoo engineer Jeremy Zawodny shows the story traveled fast through the blogging community itself.
First-order effects
- Small-business Yahoo Web Hosting customers get Movable Type bundled as the preferred blogging option, giving Six Apart a mass-market distribution channel it did not have selling licenses directly.
Second-order effects
- Rival hosts and portals — including Google with Blogger and Microsoft with its own SMB offerings — face pressure to match the bundling model, turning blog software into a checkbox feature of hosting packages rather than a standalone purchase.
Third-order effects
- If portal distribution becomes the default route to market for independent publishing tools, vendors like Six Apart trade license revenue for reach, and the value migrates toward whoever owns the hosting relationship and the customer data around the blog.
The trend: Mid-2000s portals are absorbing independent social-publishing tools through partnerships and acquisitions to lock in small-business and consumer users.