Six Apart Sells LiveJournal To Russia's SUP
Six Apart has sold its hosting blogging platform LiveJournal, which it acquired in January 2005, to Moscow-headquarted SUP (pronounced "soup"), the company said this evening. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a chapter Six Apart opened in January 2005 when it bought LiveJournal, and it lands after a rough 2007 for the community: a June mass deletion swept up legitimate accounts, sparked a user revolt, and forced a public apology from then-chief executive Barak Berkowitz. The divestiture also fits Six Apart's broader refocusing — it bought feed-reader Rojo in September 2006 (its Rojo acquisition), shipped a Movable Type 4 beta in June, added integrated forums to Movable Type in November, and joined Google's OpenSocial effort and an open-social-graph initiative this fall.
The story travelled unusually fast and wide for a deal with no disclosed terms: within a day it appeared on GigaOM, Mashable, the San Francisco Chronicle's Technology Chronicles, and LiveJournal's own news page — a measure of how central the platform still was to the early blogging era.
First-order effects
- LiveJournal's user base — including its large Russian-speaking community — now falls under Moscow-headquartered SUP, with undisclosed terms giving users no stated commitments on pricing, moderation, or hosting.
- Six Apart exits the free consumer-community hosting business it struggled to monetize, freeing it to concentrate on its paid professional tooling around Movable Type and TypePad.
Second-order effects
- SUP inherits a US-built platform whose culture and infrastructure sit far from its home market, making cross-border operation of user data and community policy an immediate practical question for the new owner.
- Six Apart's portfolio logic sharpens into a tools-plus-openness strategy — OpenID, the open social graph initiative, OpenSocial — positioning it against platform lock-in rather than running destination communities itself.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, first-generation blogging communities get reconsolidated under owners in their densest geographic or linguistic markets, pulling a once-borderless social web toward national and regional jurisdictions.
- The deal makes ownership jurisdiction of user-generated content a live governance issue: a platform founded and hosted in the US now answering to a foreign media company previews questions regulators and users will press on every cross-border acquisition of community networks.
The trend: Early blogging communities are being shed by diversified acquirers and reconsolidated under media companies closest to their largest user bases, decoupling platform ownership from platform origin.