Six Apart Acquires Rojo
Blogging platform company Six Apart will announce this morning that it has acquired Rojo, a feed reader and search engine that competes with Bloglines and other companies. — Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but our assumption was that this a less than $5 million deal.
Context & Ripple Effects
Six Apart enters this deal as the company behind Movable Type — described in late 2005 as the most popular software for professional blogs — though its hosted service has a credibility problem to manage: TypePad spent weeks below expected service levels in October 2005 and suffered its worst outage yet that December. Buying Rojo extends it beyond blog authoring into feed consumption and feed search.
The pickup is unusually broad for a sub-$5 million deal of undisclosed terms: sixapart.com, GigaOM, Niall Kennedy and Kevin Burton all carried it the same day, and B2Day framed the question the acquisition forces — are feed readers just another feature? That matters because Rojo competes directly with Bloglines, the category leader among standalone readers.
First-order effects
- Bloglines now faces a rival whose reader is bundled with the largest independent blogging platform, so the contest shifts from winning subscribers one signup at a time to whoever controls the default reading experience for Six Apart's installed base.
Second-order effects
- Standalone feed-reader startups lose their most plausible exit as an IPO-scale business and get pushed toward acquisition or differentiation on search and attention features — exactly the 'just another feature' framing B2 Day raised on announcement day.
Third-order effects
- If platform companies keep absorbing readers and feed-search layers, feed consumption consolidates from independent destinations into a feature of content platforms — making whoever owns both the publishing tool and the reading surface the gatekeeper for how blogs reach audiences.
The trend: Feed reading is migrating from standalone products to bundled platform features, with blogging incumbents buying the consumption layer to match their publishing dominance.