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Voice - Thursday, May 10, 2007

Odeo Sold-off to Sonic Mountain

As a memory refresher, Evan Williams founded Blogger and sold it to Google. Then with some fanfare he launched and raised funding for podcasting startup Odeo. It didn't work out well so he did some complicated maneuvers to buy back Odeo from the VCs. Somewhere along the line he founded the Twitter application. He has now sold Odeo to Sonic Mountain.

Odeo quotes Hitwise: “Odeo is the only vertical podcasting site that has emerged from the pack: It has received five times more traffic than its nearest competitor." In a recent 30 day period Odeo served 700K uniques and 3M pageviews.

In a blog post last month Williams confessed: "In the last few months, we here at Obvious have been increasingly focused on Twitter. As a result, our original product, Odeo, has not gotten the attention it deserves. It does not cost us much to run—in fact, AdSense covers the hosting—but on the web you need to constantly improve, or fade away. We've put too much into Odeo to want to see it fade away. And it still has tons of potential. But we're not improving it fast enough.

It seems likely Odeo is worth more to someone else than it is to us at this point, so we're looking for a new home for it. We've been having some conversations with potential buyers, and this is our attempt to put the word out more widely in the most expeditious way (and without involving investment bankers and the like). If we don't get any attractive offers, we'll continue to run it."

There is no word on how much Odeo sold for, but Williams indicated he was open to variety of scenarios—from cash offer to an equity position. Sonic Mountain is a NYC-based company that was founded in November 2006 and says it is focused on Podcasting, however, before Odeo it did not seem to yet have a product.

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