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Web 2.0 - Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Pluck Corp. Goes To Demand Media

Richard Rosenblat's Demand Media continues to do buyout deals. The latest is its acquisition of Austin, TX-based Pluck. As we have documented, VC-backed Pluck made a deft transition from being an RSS reader to a blog syndication network, called BlogBurst, that connects newspapers to blogs. Pluck has another product called SiteLife, which are Web services for their clients to add interactive features to their sites.

Pluck has raised about $17M in funding with Reuters invested about $7M in 2006. Reauters cites a source who put the buyout at $50-60M. Techcrunch reports that the selling price was $75M and that Pluck had $10M in revenues.

The synergies (sorry for dropping that jargon) between Pluck and domain name giant Demand Media are not entirely clear. Demand Media has acquired technology that it can use across its sites to attract more users. PaidContent reports: "Rosenblatt said that Puck fits into its strategy of taking Demand’s network growth off its own network, and helping publishers take those learnings and bake them into the tools." That strategy is a bit hard for us to follow. We suppose that means that Demand Media wants to use Pluck to get its content on the pages of larger media sites. But why does it need to buy Pluck to do that? We'll keep our eye on this.