Technorati acquires a place to show ads, called BlogCritics

Written on 26th August 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

It hasn’t appeared on the Technorati blog yet, but Michael Arrington broke the news: Technorati has acquired BlogCritics, a 6-year old blog network that draws around 1 million unique monthly visitors who watch 3 to 4 million pages.

In June, Technorati launched a blog advertising network called Technorati Media. CEO Richard Jalichandra wrote in the announcing blog post that “over the next several months, we’ll be adding blogs from the mid and long tail within those verticals.” Seems like he did just now, only in a slightly less orthodox way.

Where one would expect Technorati to focus on some sort of affiliate program, it just buys a network which gives them enough space and pageviews to place ads on. According to Crunchbase, BlogCritics has published 73,000 articles from 2,300 authors. Exactly, those bloggers are from the mid and long tail.

Jalichandra told Arrington that they will probably acquire more content sites soon. Well, truth be told, it’s a efficient way of building a solid blog ads network, that’s for sure. Although it does bring up an interesting question, is Technorati is a search company, or a media company? When choosing for the latter, who will guarantee me that Technorati search results aren’t biased?