SixApart sells LJ... so friggin' WHAT?!? Somebody PLEASE write the bigger story here.

Seriously people: stop regurgitating the fucking PR, and do some real reporting on the story behind the story on the SixApart sale of LiveJournal.

NEWSFLASH: IF I WANT TO READ THE PRESS RELEASE, I DON'T NEED TO READ YOUR BLOG(S).

Sarah Lacy's puff piece on BusinessWeek fawning over Chris Alden reads more like a favor to a friend than hard-hitting journalism by an ostensibly numbers-focused business magazine -- Sarah: where are the #'s?  TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, BetweenTheLines, PaidContent... wtf?  you guys are all just rewriting the press release. 

WHERE IS THE FRIGGIN' INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM HERE?

 Owen?  Kara?  Buehler?  Buehler?  Anybody?

Some interesting items to read about, if anyone has the balls / gumption to write a real story:

• what was the LJ sale price? are the Komersant #s accurate or not?
• was the upside on original 6A LJ purchase good, bad, or indifferent?
• what are 6A current financials?  profitable or not?  trend up or down?  (at least speculate... or infer revenue from metrics/gossip?)
• rev $ by property?  (MT, Typepad, Vox?)  trend up or down? 
• market share of 6A vs competitors?  how about a graph?
• is 6A being packaged for sale? if so, what would #s need to be?
• how does this relate to Automattic's M&A talks & recent financing?
• why hasn't Yahoo bought 6A already?  did they want too much?  were #'s ever discussed?  (note to owen: assign someone to stalk andrew anker)
• why did Chris Alden take over?  what didn't Barak do well? 
• is Chris the pretty face for packaging a deal?  what / when / who?

i'm not in the journalism business professionally, and my blogging hardly takes the place of real in-depth reporting, but you guys really need to buckle down and earn your keep.

this is a big, meaty topic... 6A has been in orbit around other big players for a couple of years now.  SOMEONE should be telling this story, instead of simply reporting a one-off sale or the latest social networking feature release.  SixApart is a REAL company with REAL revenues, and sometime in the last 2 years they either should have been bought, merged, or put down a big footprint with a significant strategy for growth & expansion.  Yahoo is a natural fit / acquirer, particularly after the Facebook non-purchase fiasco & the astonishing lack of impact by any Yahoo social media initiatives over the past 3 years (other acquisitions like Flickr excepted).  the fact that SixApart hasn't been bought yet is the elephant in the room, not this other bullshit about selling LJ.

first blog / reporter who actually does a little digging and writes a real story gets a gold fucking star.

Comments

[Jeremy Pepper]

Because it's about lazy blogging - shit, I cried about this a while ago that no one called up Kryptonite to get the real story there, and no one called up FedEx to get the real story there when they had bullshit memes out there.

Oh, wait, I called FedEx and got their side of the story.

Most bloggers aren't journalists, and are lazy. They want to be first, not right.

[dave mcclure]

@ alanp: for sure.

i was commenting about Beacon over on Henry Blodget's blog.

[dave mcclure]

hey andrew -

thanks for the color commentary. i appreciate that a lot of the #'s of interest are private / confidential, however i'd still suggest that user metrics, market share metrics, & product pricing (for at least TypePad, if not MT) would provide a lot of interesting info that someone could aggregate to tell a very interesting story...

ultimately, i wasn't accusing / criticizing Six Apart for not telling the story, or for hiding anything -- rather, i'm suggesting that 6A *is* a pretty compelling company that has been incredibly under-reported over the past 2 years. that the blogger / journalist community wasn't telling the 6A story in more depth & numbers strikes me as a disservice to their readers. i hope those guys take a 2nd look and write more about it.

anyway, hopefully selling LJ allows you folks to focus more on your core business lines, and look forward to hearing more about where you guys are headed in 2008.

- dmc

[alan p]

I thought the bigger story was Beacon ;)

[Andrew Anker]

Dave... I'm ultimately not sure what you're getting at here, most of the data you want to know is confidential to Six Apart and as a private company, we (like most every other private company in the Valley) don't disclose it. The only thing I will say is that Komersant's number is not correct.

In terms of a "bigger" story, I'm not surprised that no reporter has found one because we're being very upfront about where we are. As you know, we have a new CEO and it is not unusual for strategies to change and new priorities to develop when a company goes through that. It has been no secret to many people, we were not investing sufficient amounts into LJ to help it realize its potential. SUP both wanted to and had the resources to invest, we had already been working together with them for a year and we thought we would work with them to put LJ into good hands quickly. I know it's a boring story, but it is the story nonetheless.

As to why we're not owned by Yahoo yet, we don't feel like the only successful outcome of building a "real company with real revenues" is to get bought, so it's not something we've spent a lot of time thinking about. We're very excited about our future roadmap and are in no rush to be bought out before we can realize it. From what I can tell from the Automattic news, Matt and Toni feel the same way about their business.

[kintan]

I want to see what Mena Trott or Anil Dash has to say about this..

[James D Kirk]

Simply said THANK YOU Mr. McClure. Not only is the echo chamber resoundingly bad enough, but when one subscribes to the likes of Scoble's shared feeds (some interesting items come about regularly) as well as subscribing to the *tech*.* sites, one reads about 45 versions of that same damned release you suggest we all just read vs. subscribing to any of the feeds.

I could agree with you more, but what's the point? Several someones are likely to post on this story many times over, so I don't need to!

[SexySEO]

I don't think that "this is a big, meaty topic"
For me the whole situation sounds like "Much Ado About Nothing" :)
Who needs "the most popular blogging platform and social network in Russia"?

[Alex Williams]

Dave - Right on, man! Press release coverage is lazy and a disservice to the community. It's an unhealthy practice to bow to the corporate story. It leads to false perceptions. Worse, it's boring. Dave - thanks for calling them out on this one.

[pwb]

I heart D Mac!