Blog search company Technorati announced Tuesday that it has laid off six employees and will cut salaries by 10 percent to 15 percent for the rest of its workforce, which after the layoffs, now number 45.
Responding to what he believes is a worsening economic climate, Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra said in a blog post that deciding to lay off employees was difficult because of the "high performers who have worked long hours to get us where we are now. They're also friends, and we're very sad to see them go." He claims that Technorati needed to become a "leaner" organization to confront 2009's challenges.
Layoffs aside, Jalichandra reassured readers that Technorati is performing well and its future is bright. The layoffs, Jalichandra claims, are an effort to ensure that Technorati's hope for success becomes more likely.
"In spite of these challenging times, Technorati's prospects haven't changed, and in fact, have never been brighter," Jalichandra said. "In the past year, we've launched several very promising initiatives, and our business has grown significantly. Our overall strategy is not changing, however, the economy has changed dramatically so we're adjusting to meet it."
Technorati wouldn't say who was laid off from the company, but it did say that two of the employees who lost their jobs were executives.
For a listing of other layoffs in the tech sector, check out our Layoff Scorecard.
Things haven't been so hot over at blog search company Technorati ever since Google debuted its Google Blog Search tool. But the company has kept going, and on Wednesday announced that it has launched its ad platform in an alpha test, after acquiring start-up AdEngage to power it.
In June, Technorati launched "Technorati Media," an ad network that now has about 45 participating Web sites. With AdEngage, which uses the now-common "self-service" model, advertisers can buy ads in the Technorati Media network directly. The new network, the company says, will be called Technorati Engage.
"Our goal all along has been to open up something that works for everyone, and that is ideally suited to the 'long tail.' While the audiences here are smaller, the levels of engagement, influence and audience expertise are exponentially higher," said Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra in a release Wednesday. "It's also been an incredibly challenging space for advertisers to target and buy. With Technorati Engage, advertisers can very easily achieve the necessary levels of targeting and critical mass."
In the past two years, Technorati has made a number of small acquisitions, like news aggregator Personal Bee and the "online magazine" Blogcritics. AdEngage itself, which has been serving ads on participating sites since 2004, will continue to exist on its own as well.
With nearly 1,000,000 posts a day, the blogosphere is overflowing with content and now fully established as a mainstream rather than fringe phenomenon. Traditional media have adopted blogs as a complementary form of content to the traditional news and feature stories. According to Techhnorati's latest report on the state of the blogosphere, many bloggers are making money. Technorati surveyed a sample of about 1,000 bloggers and found that the mean annual revenue for advertising is $6,000, but sites with 100,000 or more unique visitors are generating more than $75,000 in revenue.
(Credit:
Technorati)
None of these results is surprising. Blogs started as a means of personal expression, and now offer more than a billion people the tools to self-publish. Traditional publishers and an armada of new, innovative publishers, as well as millions of readers, have embraced the blog format and ethos. Marketers, readers, publishers, politicians, and most people on the planet with access to the Internet understand the diversity of voices, as well as the cacophony, that blogs allow. The more savvy bloggers are getting sophisticated about search engine optimization, developing a niche, and making money. Technorati will dribble out more results from its survey this week, illuminating the what, why, and how of blogging.
Technorati Media, parent company of blog search site Technorati, has acquired Blogcritics.org. The newly purchased site is a user-fueled "online magazine" for bloggers that was already a member of the newish Technorati Media ad network.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Technorati has said that it plans to keep Blogcritics an intact, separate property.
With the acquisition, Technorati says it hopes to help Blogcritics contributors make some money, as well as scale the property to give it more reach. "As part of Technorati Media, we'll be able to grow the community and further improve our platform to attract new audiences," Blogcritics founder Eric Olsen said in a release. "Technorati's mission to help bloggers and people who read blogs is the ideal complement for us."
Acquiring content properties, however, likely won't change the fact that Technorati has been losing ground to Mountain View, Calif.-powered Google Blog Search and (to an extent) the search feature that Twitter built into its technology when it bought Summize. Technorati founder David Sifry has long since left the company, and he's now at the helm of a new start-up called Offbeat Guides.
Blog aggregation start-up Technorati will be launching an ad network later on Tuesday called "Technorati Media," TechCrunch reported. This marks a new direction for the company, which has heretofore focused on blog search and directories.
As TechCrunch commenters note, this is not exactly revolutionary. Ad networks are everywhere. What makes Technorati Media different from a Glam Media or Federated Media is apparently the fact that it'll advertise on "the little guys" as well as high-traffic blogs, promising a better deal than Google's ubiquitous AdSense (it's similar to what Six Apart is doing).
There is also a top-notch lineup of advertisers already on board, which reportedly include Twentieth Century Fox Film, Acura, Adobe Systems, Best Buy, Chevrolet, Honda Motor, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Nike, Paramount Pictures, SanDisk, Scion, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Toyota Motor, T-Mobile, Universal Pictures, Verizon, and Visa.
But bloggers have reason to be skeptical, and not just because there are so many ad networks already: Technorati just hasn't been doing a first-rate job in the performance department recently.
Compete.com shows an overall traffic decline since last year, with the exception of a major spike in November that has since subsided. CEO David Sifry stepped down in August, in a move accompanied by several layoffs.
The blog search niche has, meanwhile, been crowded with Google Blog Search--and for zeitgeist measurement tools, there are plenty of Twitter applications that are far more up-to-the-moment.
Some TechCrunch commenters welcomed an alternative to AdSense that would bring in better revenues for smaller publishers. But others brought up Technorati's system outage issues--which admittedly aren't as prolific as, say, Twitter's--and raised concerns about joining a new ad network coming from a company that some have seen as mismanaged.
One directed a comment to Technorati's management and said, "Please fix RSS feeds on search queries first, before you do anything else. They stopped working weeks ago." Another posed the question, "If they've been unable to keep the system functioning and can't track my posts, what makes you think they'll be able to track and pay out ad revenue?"
The commenter continued, "I'll stick with AdSense: I get a nice check every month!"
Technorati clearly needed to change direction in the wake of Google Blog Search, but launching an ad network might just be too little, too late.
Other sites that also work to aggregate the hottest stories on the Internet include Gabe Rivera's Techmeme and Tailrank. In my opinion, Technorati Topics comes up short, while Techmeme succeeds, simply because of the way that the stories are displayed. Techmeme reads more like a newspaper, with the most talked about stories of the moment on the top of the page, and its River feature, which shows the stories in chronological order. Technorati Topics lets the stories fall down the page, much like Digg Spy. The reason why this doesn't work particularly well for Technorati Topics is because so many blogs are included in its pool.
It seems as if Technorati is displaying every blog post from those in its pool, instead of the popular ones. It is really hard to tell from looking at Technorati Topics what the most important and popular stories are. While it may be entertaining to watch Technorati Topics for a few minutes to see some blog posts, the speed at which the stories fall down the page, along with the lack of filtering for individual posts, really hurts the service.
I have been a big fan of Technorati for awhile now, and it has been really painful to watch it struggle recently. Even though Technorati Topics will probably not be a smash hit it its current state, it's nice to see the site pushing out new features again and trying to get back on top. Hopefully this is just one of many things that Technorati has up its sleeves as it tries to get back on its feet.
Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of blog search company Technorati, has stepped down from his post according to an entry on the company blog. The resignation is effective immediately; he will remain chairman of Technorati's board. Meanwhile, CFO Teresa Malo, vice president of engineering Dorion Carroll and vice president of marketing Derek Gordon will jointly run the company while seeking a new chief executive.
"Making tough choices is a daily reality," Sifry wrote. "But some choices are tougher than others, particularly when they involve one's own self." Technorati, an early entry in the blog search market, has recently been plagued by technical difficulties, revenue headaches and competition from Google Blog Search. Sifry's resignation, as he notes, was not unexpected: "For those of you who follow Technorati regularly, you know that we've been conducting a CEO search since Spring and that it was just a matter of time before I made a transition," he explained. "Rather than waiting for the process to play out, I would go ahead and transition to the board exclusively, taking on the role of Chairman of the Board."
Sifry also announced that eight members of Technorati's staff have been laid off in a move to "adjust our expense structure to be more appropriately aligned with our priorities moving forward."
SAN FRANCISCO--A power outage hit downtown San Francisco Tuesday afternoon, leaving thousands of residents without power and knocking popular Web sites such as Craigslist, GameSpot, Yelp, Technorati, TypePad and Netflix offline for a few hours.
The power failure apparently hit 365 Main, a 227,000-square-foot data center in downtown San Francisco, particularly hard. The data colocation center's client list includes Craigslist and CNET Networks' GameSpot, a sister site of News.com.
It wasn't immediately clear if the other affected Web sites were customers of 365 Main or of other Web hosting companies, or whether the sites were blacked out for all visitors.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
At 4 p.m. PDT in an e-mailed statement, Miles Kelly, 365 Main's vice president of marketing, had this to say: "At 1:45 pm today, there was a major power event in San Francisco that impacted business operations for many San Francisco based companies, including 365 Main's San Francisco data center. PG&E has not yet determined the cause of the failure. Some customers within the 365 Main facility were temporarily effected by the utility failure. The building is currently 100 percent operational and running on back-up power (generators) until the company can confirm that utility power is stable."
Most sites seemed to be working again by 4:45 p.m. What this means for 365 Main's service agreements with its customers, which promises 24-hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week, 365-days-a-year power, is still unclear. We're waiting to hear more from 365 Main. In an ironic note, a press release from 365 Main dated Tuesday noted the company had provided Red Envelope "two years of continuous uptime."
Update 5:00 p.m.: Asked why the data center company, which bills itself as "the world's finest data centers," failed to meet its standard of ensuring service to customers even in the event of a power failure, Kelly said "I don't know."
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Pacific Gas & Electric said that more than 30,000 of its customers lost power after an explosion under a manhole cover on Mission Street.
A man exits the main entrance of 365 Main on Tuesday.
(Credit: Elinor Mills/CNET News.com)Contrary to prior reports, there was no mob of angry customers outside the 365 Main building, and no drunk employee had gone on a rampage, according to Kelly. The "mob" was actually a line of customers who were forced to enter through the front door and have badges checked manually to get into the building because the parking garage gate was affected by the power outage, according to Chris Hutchens, a network engineer at SF Data, which is a customer of 365 Main.
Update July 25, 9 a.m.: Kelly released some more details of went wrong at the San Francisco data center. While they still don't know all the answers, here's what they're saying now:
--Power was restored at 2:34 p.m. Tuesday afternoon, after a 45-minute outage at 365 Main. At least three of the eight colocation rooms were affected, and possibly more.
--So far it is estimating that the power failure impacted 20 to 40 percent of its San Francisco customers.
--The company is still investigating why parts of the back-up generator system failed during Tuesday's power surge.
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