Technorati Changed Their Business and Few Noticed
Technorati is getting some heat for hiring bloggers... getting heat from people who wish the company would just do better the thing that they used to do which proved to not be a business worth having. See the logic?
Context & Ripple Effects
Technorati's slide from blog-search authority has been running for years: the company confirmed a CEO search in spring 2007, brought in Richard Jalichandra that October, then quietly gutted the index itself by dropping all content older than six months and relaunching as a memetracker in December 2007. Analysts had already been asking what the asset was worth — Read/WriteWeb laid out its exit options back in March 2007.
The intervening record explains why hiring bloggers is the move: an April 2009 layoff of about 10% of staff under Jalichandra, and secret merger talks with blog network b5media that collapsed days before completion in 2008. The irony critics are pointing at is that Jalichandra himself called Techmeme 'a great little site' in October 2007 — praising the very model his own memetracker relaunch chased, and one that never turned into a real business either.
First-order effects
- Bloggers gain a paying client in Technorati at the exact moment its original product — a comprehensive, current blog index — no longer exists to attract them.
- Users who relied on Technorati as a search-and-rank tool lose any prospect of its return, since the company is now staffing up around content rather than crawling.
Second-order effects
- Memetracker rivals like Techmeme face less pressure from Technorati's half-step imitation, while blog networks such as b5media — whose merger talks with Technorati blew up last year — see a would-be acquirer become a competing buyer of blogger labor.
- Advertisers weighing blog reach can now buy it through Technorati directly, compressing the middleman role that both search engines and blog networks were selling.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, first-generation blog-infrastructure companies end up converging on the same endpoint: abandoning their index or ranking product, which never monetized, to become media or ad businesses — a structural transition from tool to publisher.
- The criticism itself marks a norm shift — audiences increasingly accept that beloved free web utilities must either find a business or disappear, making 'just do the old thing better' an argument most startups can't afford to answer.
The trend: Web-era discovery platforms are converting unmonetized index products into content and advertising businesses, with hiring the audience becoming cheaper than serving it.