Long-standing blogging platform OverBlog has been acquired by Webedia, a French online media company, for “less than $6.9 million” (€5 million) according to L’Opinion.
OverBlog co-founder and CEO Frédéric Montagnon wrote on his blog that it’s been a long and winding road for OverBlog.
OverBlog was created ten years ago. As a reminder, the web was very different back then in 2004: Twitter and Tumblr didn’t exist, Facebook just opened for Harvard students. The Motorola Razr was the most popular phone. The year before that, Google acquired Blogger, which was also the year that the open source project called WordPress started.
In other words, it made a lot of sense to start a better blogging platform. But a couple of years after its inception, OverBlog became something slightly different and turned into a media company. Television network TF1 invested in OverBlog. Then the startup merged with Ebuzzing, Wikio and Nomao in 2010. After that, only one thing mattered: building an audience.
At the same time, Ebuzzing slowly but surely became an advertising technology company. It recently merged with Teads, and the newly formed company is aiming for an IPO in 2015. Selling OverBlog will streamline the company a bit in order to stay focused on ad tech.
Webedia is a sort of French version of Gawker with many content brands around fashion, music, cinema, lifestyle and more. It will keep OverBlog intact and grow its audience. Adding millions of pageviews will be a great asset for Webedia to pitch potential advertisers.
Montagnon, who has been based in New York for a few years, won’t take part in the acquisition. He will work on other projects in New York instead.
