Matt Mullenweg snaps up PollDaddy

Matt Mullenweg’s Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform, has announced the acquisition of PollDaddy, a company that provides embeddable poll and survey widgets, as reported on Mashable. Mullenweg writes on his personal blog:

For a year or two now, I’ve been minorly obsessed with polls and surveys as a method of lightweight interaction that engages casual users of your website and also can get you some really fun data to play with. I’ve also mentioned at a few WordCamps that a polling plugin is one of the top 10 WordPress plugins in the world. Polls are really popular with WordPress users.

As we started to look at building out our own service for this, it became more obvious that, while on the surface it’s a very simple problem, there’s a lot of hidden complexity and opportunities for some really powerful features under the hood. There are probably a dozen companies addressing this space right now, but as we started to survey the space I was struck by how often I’d see this “PollDaddy” thing pop up.

Apart from basic polls, PollDaddy aims to provide a fuller suite of data-collecting widgets. PollDaddy distributes a new online survey tool and a more generic form generator that is capable of making contact forms. They offer a nifty quiz generator as well. All of these new embeddable tools will build upon the success of the company’s ubiquitous poll widget, which has attracted 70,000 users and is viewed across the web 70 million times per month. According to the company, about 1 million polls have been created and 195 million votes have been collected to date.

PollDaddy started out as a two-man, self-funded operation based in Ireland. The team (Eoin and Lenny) will be joining Automattic and keep working on the product, and they have stated that the service will keep on supporting MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, etc.

Automattic’s funding exceeds $30 million, which was raised in two rounds and includes notable investors like True Ventures and the New York Times. Earlier this year, Automattic acquired the blog comment plugin Intense Debate.