RSS Consolidation

Posted by: Heather Green on May 19

Here is Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher’s response to an email I sent about consolidation and a question from people here had about how he would achieve the goal of being the top blog search service by this summer. (Sorry, didn’t get some of the questions in time to get to him.)

Q: Is there anything you can say to substantiate your claim that Bloglines search will other dwarf other services?

A: Bloglines already has blog search features that are competitive with any other blog search tool on the market today. But I think the whole category can do better. Through our partnership with AskJeeves, we have access to world class Teoma search technology that gives us a competitive advantage in taking blog search to the next level.

Q: Do you expect further consolidation?

A: What we’re seeing is typical in a maturing market: there’s lots of money and lots of companies chasing the opportunity. I’m sure we’ll see more consolidation as the smaller players jockey for position in a very competitive market.

Q: Who is likely to get bought and what do you expect the RSS aggregator market to look like over time?

A: There are hundreds of point players that touch some part of the RSS/blog puzzle, so who knows where the next M&A activity will come from.

Down the road we’ll see a field dominated by a few big players that offer rich services, and I believe we’ll be at the top of that list. RSS and blogging functionality are becoming critical to the Internet surfing experience, and if you’re a major Internet player you’ve got to have it. Ask Jeeves saw that early on when they started talking with us.

Q: How do the services that are remaining compete?
A: There’s a big range of players: there are lots of point tools that address parts of the whole, like services that just do blog search, services that are just readers, services that are just blogging. There are the desktop software downloads that are going to have to figure out how to compete with Microsoft. Then there are a few big online players who integrate it all—Bloglines included—and that’s where it’s going to get interesting.

Q: What are you focusing on right now?
A: 1/Continuing to build out Bloglines, adding more features and making it easy for everyone to use.

2/Executing on our Universal Inbox strategy, helping people collect all kinds of unique-to-me dynamic web information within Bloglines. In fact, we just rolled out custom weather feeds yesterday.

3/Delivering world class blog search.

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