Yahoo buys Buzztracker for $5 million

September 14, 2007 | Eric Eldon | Comments |

buzztracker-logo.pngYahoo is purchasing a news aggregation site called BuzzTracker for $5 million according to Kara Swisher at AllThingsD.

Buzztracker uses algorithms to search through over 110,000 hand-picked web sites, aggregating the most popular and interesting stories on its homepage. It will become part of Yahoo News, which claims to have 36 million unique visitors a month.

Buzztracker is somewhat similar to Techmeme and its affiliated aggregator sites, such as Memeorandum. BuzzTracker’s site features top stories on news, tech, sports, celebrity gossip, and other topics on a single page whereas Techmeme presents separate sites for separate audiences. For example, Buzztracker’s news of its sale to Yahoo appears on the site’s homepage (see screenshot).

BuzzTracker is the flagship product of Participate Media, which is being bought in its entirety: The entire staff will move to Yahoo, and Participate Media chief executive Alan Warms will become the vice president and general manager of Yahoo News.

The company has never taken on outside investment, according to Fred Wilson.

bzztrackr.jpg


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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Tim Jones
    Eric - you need to clarify the second paragraph. It's Yahoo News that gets 36 million users per month NOT BuzzTracker! From the traffic estimates I've seen, BuzzTracker gets only 10,000 to 35,000 users per month.

    Also, if I'm not mistaken, TechMeme was originally called Memeorandum. The two sites are run by the same person, so calling them "affiliated aggregators" is not entirely accurate.
  • Thanks. Clarified paragraph.
  • "TechMeme was originally called Memeorandum"

    Well, the politics site is still at memeorandum.com. The tech site used to be at tech.memeorandum.com. For all the complaints about Alexa, it clearly shows when the tech content moved to Techmeme.com and kept most of the traffic. (Well, the actual date isn't clear, but it was circa April 2006.)

    (I think "affiliated" is correct though perhaps not strong enough. My BuzzTracker roundup post called them "companion sites" (and I included the lesser-known WeSmirch and Ballbug).
  • Yahoo buys Buzztracker for $5 million can possibly be very interesting material when you enunciate spectaularly; thanks!