Entry tags:

lj/ij

The Low-Down on 6A
Important information here, folks. Beneath the cut you'll find a fairly complete history of Six Apart's activities and financial dealings. From this, I think we can glean a pretty clear picture of what happened with Strikethrough, what's gone on since then, and what we can expect from 6A in future. I think people need to see this; pass it on.

SIX APART: Where Have We Been, and Where do We Go From Here?

2001
- Six Apart is established based on their Movable Type Blogware. This is their "cash cow" for all their later ventures.

2003
- 6A raises venture capital from Neoteny in order to open the TypePad blog site (a business oriented blog).

2004
- October

- 6A secures $10 million in funding from August Capital. The interesting thing here is August Capital's stated goals of investing: they want to invest early in growing companies with a view toward going public for big profits. From this and later funding, August essentially owns 6A.

2005
- January

- 6A buys LJ, presumably with the money from August.

2006
- February

- 6A secures another $12 million from August Capital, Intel, and Focus Ventures. Check out the third and fourth paragraphs of this article. What's interesting is that 6A says they've received a total of $23 million in funding. That means the investment by Neotony was only $1 million. O rly? This looks a bit like a smoke screen here, since Neotony is the "front" for their company. Perhaps they don't want you looking too closely at their real owners -- August.

- March

- 6A buys Splashblog, a mobile blogging service for an undisclosed amount. The service is integrated into their other sites.

- April

- 6A introduces advertising on all its sites.

- May

- 6A opens Vox. Anil Dash shows up in the comments again in defense mode. Apparently he's in charge of damage control. All the comments are interesting here.

- September

- 6A buys Rojo -- rumors say for $5 million -- which has since been dismantled. They didn't want the company; only the people. The Rojo CEO was moved to the head of the Movable Type division of 6A.

- October

- 6A hires MRM Worldwide to develop an ad model for Vox. There is no mention of LiveJournal, but modifications to the deal could have been made after the big public announcement.

- November

- Wordpress starts up. 6A now has major competition for their "cash cow". Presumably this is when they start working on the upgrade to Movable Type; more on this later. If you check out the linked article, you'll find that Anil Dash again pops up in the comments to defend his company. Hmm, is there a little anxiety there?

Summary to this point: Okay, so now the pressure is on 6A. Their boss (August) is pushing them to go public, they have some major competition (Wordpress), Vox sucks, and LJ is oh-my-god full of porn! What to do? Go a little crazy apparently.


2007
- April

- 6A hires Omniture to track activity on LJ (traffic to sites visited and such). What do you bet MRM is in the mix somewhere?

- May

- Strikethrough. Are they desperate to clean up LJ so they can go public, or is it just a knee-jerk reaction to WFI? Or are they desperate to hang on to their advertisers since that is becoming their main source of revenue?

- June

- Permanent account sale. It would be interesting to know just how much they made here, but I’m sure they won’t tell us!

- August

- 6A releases the upgrade for Movable Type. Upgrade looking good... or is it? Our friend, Anil Dash, shows up in the comments to this article yet again.

- Meanwhile, it seems that Wordpress is still kicking ass and taking names.

- Pepsi ads. Is 6A getting desperate for money?

All this may have nothing to do with the censorship; however, I would almost place bets that 6A is under pressure to get things in order to either sell out or go public. They’ve spent all the venture capital they raised and presumably can’t get more unless they start showing a profit. The money they rake in from paid accounts, v-gift, etc. on LJ is really only a drop in the bucket. Movable Type, which has always been their primary source of income, now has some stiff competition. The money they get from advertising is very important to them at this point, and since they’ve stated in their ToS (yeah, it’s there -- just have to dig a bit) and in the promotion of paid accounts on LJ that these accounts are "ad-free", they’re looking for a way around it without actually changing the ToS to avoid the California law that says they would have to refund unsatisfied users' money if they change the ToS. Well, they’ve just had their fingers slapped hard over the sponsored v-gifts, so what will they come up with next?

I think now that the real issue behind Strikethrough was that WFI was threatening to go to 6A's advertisers. They don’t care about "pornography" or protecting minors -- they just need money. So, in future, if any group threatens them again in the same manner, we can expect more censoring. Also, we've been asking 6A to clarify their policies regarding these issues, but they simply can't. If another group like WFI were to threaten to strike through their advertisers, they would be forced to react in the same fashion again.


A few footnotes:
- Apparently, 6A doesn't learn from experience.
- Also! We've all seen this article about Brad leaving 6A. However, in the comments is a link to an interesting set of statistics about LJ. It seems that the users are actually shrinking at a steady rate. Which has probably since accelerated...

ETA: And now they're disguising advertising as a contest! Getting sneaky there, guys.

"This, madam, is a faithful narrative of every event in which we have been concerned together..."