Bloglines
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Bloglines was a web-based RSS feed reader and aggregator founded in 2003 by Mark Fletcher. In the early days of RSS it was the go-to reader for early adopters, letting users subscribe to, read and manage feeds in the browser, and by mid-2005 it had archived over 200 million blog articles with a blog search engine layered on top. Ask Jeeves/Ask.com (IAC) acquired the service in February 2005. Under IAC the product saw little innovation and lost users to Google Reader and realtime social streams.
02 / Bloglines FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Bloglines declined because the market for RSS readers shrank: users shifted news consumption to realtime streams such as Twitter and Facebook feeds, and Ask.com's own research showed a decline in RSS feed consumption. It lost the early lead to Google Reader after technical problems and outages made it unreliable, while Ask.com gave the service little attention or investment, focusing instead on its question-and-answer search business. The combination of a shrinking market, a dominant rival, and a disengaged owner made the service a losing proposition.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
Mark Fletcher, former CEO of ONElist, founded Bloglines in June 2003 as a web-based RSS reader.
- Acquired by Ask.com
Ask Jeeves/Ask.com acquired Bloglines in February 2005; by mid-2005 the service had archived over 200 million blog articles.
- Shutdown announced; rescued
In September 2010 Ask.com announced it would shut Bloglines down on October 1, citing declining RSS aggregator usage; on November 4, 2010 MerchantCircle acquired the service in a last-minute rescue.
- Final shutdown
Bloglines finally went offline in early 2015 after years of decay under MerchantCircle.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Ask.com announced the shutdown of Bloglines in September 2010, with the service ceasing on October 1, 2010, citing declining RSS aggregator usage as users shifted to realtime streams such as Twitter, and its strategic focus on the question-and-answer segment of search.
- 02
MerchantCircle acquired Bloglines on November 4, 2010 in a last-minute rescue, keeping the service running.
- 03
The service finally went offline in early 2015, ending a lifespan of about 11 and a half years.
- 04
No reliable realized loss figure with clear subject, period and basis has been disclosed; reported acquisition prices conflict and describe deal value, not loss.