Six Apart Announces New Home for LiveJournal
Acquisition of LiveJournal, creation of new operating company and investment fund by SUP promise new innovation and expansion for pioneering online community — San Francisco, CA - December 3, 2007 - Six Apart, the world's leading independent …
Context & Ripple Effects
Six Apart is formalizing what the sale of LiveJournal to Russia's SUP set in motion a day earlier: a new operating company plus an investment fund that SUP says will fund innovation and expansion for the pioneering community site. The pickup was broad — Business Week framed the deal as something that 'may revive Six Apart,' while Computerworld and even LiveJournal's own FAQ carried it, signaling how much attention an ownership change at one of the web's oldest communities still commands.
The timing matters. In May and June 2007 LiveJournal purged hundreds of sex-themed discussion groups, sweeping up literary criticism and fan-fiction accounts, then apologized via CEO Barak Berkowitz after an unprecedented user revolt. That trust deficit hung over the property as Six Apart, which had been buying rather than shedding (Rojo in 2006) and just weeks earlier announced it was fixing its forums product, chose to hand its largest community asset to a Russian buyer.
First-order effects
- LiveJournal's users and volunteer ecosystem now answer to a SUP-controlled operating company rather than Six Apart — a change of governance for a community already skittish after the 2007 deletion revolt.
- Six Apart exits the cost and moderation burden of running LiveJournal, freeing the company to concentrate on its remaining blogging and forum products as Business Week suggested the sale might revive the core business.
Second-order effects
- SUP inherits not just a site but a legitimacy problem: winning back users alienated by the deletions becomes the new operator's first product task before any promised expansion can land.
- A US-founded community moving under Russian ownership puts other independent blogging platforms on notice that distressed social properties are finding buyers abroad, reshaping who competes for their users and advertisers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, early-2000s community platforms increasingly split from the toolmakers that acquired them, with international operators absorbing the communities while the original acquirers retrench around core publishing software.
- Cross-border ownership of user-generated-content communities raises the structural question of how moderation policies travel across jurisdictions — the LiveJournal deletions showed policy decisions are where community trust is made or lost, whoever holds the deed.
The trend: Independent blogging companies are divesting large legacy communities to focused or foreign owners so they can compete on core tools, marking a consolidation phase for the first generation of social platforms.