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Content Tagged Zookoda
PayPerPost Suspends Zookoda, Deadpool Looking Likely
IZEA (PayPerPost) have suspended Zookoda, the blog to email service they acquired in April.
According to CEO Ted Murphy, the service has been suspended due to “elevated levels of abuse on Zookoda.com” and goes on to explain that the service is being used by spammers. For those that think that PayPerPost pollutes the blogosphere with spam content, the following from Murphy is rich with irony:
We hate spam. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that really enjoys spam. Some people hate spam even more than we hate spam and those people complained to our network hosting service. Our network hosting service REALLY hate spam….We’re not spammers, we don’t support spammers and we do support everybody’s freedom of choice when it comes to opting in and out email lists.
Murphy suggests that the service will return in January, but we’re putting it on deadpool watch; Zookoda has been failing for months. Most Searched reports that the service started deteriorating when IZEA took over and had gotten to the stage where it simply stopped sending out email distributions in early December. Erno H on LinkedIn reports similar problems. An email distribution service that doesn’t provide email distribution is a business with nothing going for it.
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PayPerPost Acquires Zookoda
Controversial startup PayPerPost will announce the acquisition of Zookoda, an Australian blog-to-email service, tomorrow.
We wrote about Zookoda last year, and the company put the product up for sale last September. There were reportedly a number of offers for the service when it was originally put up for sale, but the asking price of US$500,000 was too rich to close a deal. Now, nearly seven months later, PayPerPost has stepped in to acquire the company. PayPerPost is not disclosing what they paid for Zookoda, although CEO Ted Murphy did tell me it was a cash deal.
PayPerPost previously announced the acquisition of Performancing only to back out of the deal a week later. Murphy assured me that the Zookoda acquisition won’t suffer the same fate.
PayPerPost says that Zookoda has 10,000 blog customers sending emails to 2.3 million people. Like the Performancing deal, PPP will want to market their core service to those 10,000 bloggers. Murphy tells me that they are also looking for new distribution channels for their content, and email is a natural fit. PPP bloggers will probably soon be seeing pitches to join the Zookoda service, perhaps with the promise of higher payouts when they post.
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Exclusive - Zookoda Goes Up For Auction
While some companies have the ability to hire investment banks to help them sell themselves (see Grouper and Napster for recent examples), eBay is proving to the be liquidity path of last resort for many struggling web startups, or those that simply want to sell out for a few hundred thousand dollars. We’ve tracked at least six “web 2.0″ companies who’ve attempted to sell themselves on eBay over the last year, and four of the six have been put up for sale in the last month. As an aside we also noted a Digg user profile that sold on ebay for $822 in July 2006.
The chart to the left shows some of the relevant auction data, including sale date and price if a sale was closed. Three (jux2, DigForIt and Kiko) sold, two (Madhens and Huckabuck) didn’t and one (Crispads) is still pending with no bidders and a $90,000 minimum price.
Zookoda, an Australian email marketing and services company, is next up. The current service launched on March 13, 2006 and version 2 was covered on TechCrunch on its launch in May. The Zookoda.com domain name as well as the related service (source code, images, blog, partner website, admin website, database, server and documentation) is up for auction, as well as consulting time for the transition. Unlike the six companies above, however, Zookoda is holding a direct auction outside of ebay so that, in the words of co-founder Nick McNaughton in an IM conversation we had earlier, “we can have some control over our own destiny and make a considered decision on an appropriate partner.” In other words, Zookoda will have the ability to choose a partner outside of the normal eBay rules - they will not have to sell to the highest bidder and can consider things like equity/cash combinations, choose a lower bidder because it’s a better fit, etc.
More information on Zookoda and the sale is here. Expressions of interest are being gathered from September 25 through October 6. Interested parties will have an opportunity to conduct due diligence on the service, and final bids must be received by October 13. To indicate an interest in the auction, go to this page.
Nick won’t say what their minimum price is, but given that Zookoda has over 5,000 passionate blog customers and an extremely feature rich service, there will be at least a few interested parties.