The recent moves by Technorati, that are obviously for the purpose of being acquired, also involves a lot of risk.
Derek Gordon, marketing director at Technorati said, “Increasingly we’ve become the hub of all that social media on the web.”
While I would question being "the hub," they definitely are "a hub." As visitation in April shows, they had twenty percent of their visitors go to Flickr from links they found on Technorati, said Hitwise. Other top destinations from the site were MySpace (NWS-A), YouTube (GOOG) and Last.fm.
As Greg Sterling, of Sterling Market Intelligence said, “As they move into other competitive areas, they risk diluting their value proposition, but it makes sense that they would broaden their appeal in the hope of being acquired.”
Other analysts agree saying that as they move away from blog search, they could become a more attractive acquistion target, or it could hurt their core search business.
The attempt to become a portal is a major concern for those following the industry because the majority of its traffic comes from Google and other search engines.
“There’s no question that Technorati is at the center of a lot of interesting phenomenon happening on the web right now, but it’s hard to understand how it works as a stand alone business,” said Jupiter Research analyst Barry Parr.
I think this is what Technorat is seeing and the broadening of their targeted audience is their response to it. The question is if they will be able to retain their blog search following while expanding to a wider base. I think they're going to have a hard time doing it.
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