Media and advertising firm Synacor, Inc. has acquired San Francisco-based advertising firm Technorati, Inc. for $3 million.

Founded in 2002, Technorati was one of the early darlings of the then “Web 2.0” movement and tracked and ranked the then nascent blogging space.

Towards the end of the decade it shifted its focus away from being a blog tracker to being an advertising firm, serving up display advertising for leading blogs; the blog tracking service was shut down in 2014 while the advertising business still remains.

“Advertising is an important growth engine for Synacor,” Synacor Chief Executive Officer Himesh Bhise said in a statement. “In the past year we dramatically improved advertising monetization in line with our strategy to increase value for our customers.”

Sad

If you were around in the old days of blogging, before even WordPress had come to the fore and you could count blogs by the thousands, not millions, Technorati was the glue that helped bring discovery of new blogs together.

I can still remember trying desperately to get my main blog at the time (The Blog Herald) into the Top 100 at Technorati, which involved a lot of the social aspects we see today from ranking sites such as Klout: buzz, links, mentions, that sort of thing.

The blog tracking was never going to be a big money spinner for Technorati, so it instead shifted into advertising, and placing display advertising on many of the blogs it then tracked.

At its peak in the late 2000’s Technorati seemed to be going places, and I know that from experience as the founding editor of The Inquisitr ,as Technorati was our main ad supplier and in a good month we were then seeing $30,000-$40,000 coming through the door each month from Technorati alone.

That said, towards the end of my time running The Inquisitr there were clear problems with Technorati, as in they just weren’t able to fill the inventory we were giving them and word around at the time was that they lost many of their bigger sites due to this; here was a smallish San Francisco-based company competing against giants such as Google and others, and while they tried hard (and they were good people, I have many fond memories of the day I visited their office), it was always going to be David versus Goliath battle, but one in which they would always struggle to win.

Prior to acquisition, Technorati had raised $32.1 million, a relatively small amount today but big numbers a decade ago, from investors including Mobius Venture Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), August Capital, Wavemaker Partners, DG Incubation, and Reid Hoffman.

Image credit: Technorati