Actuality December 03, 2007

Russian company SUP announced about acquisition of Livejournal dot com – one of the most popular Internet services in Russia network diaries. As they say in the company official report, SUP has acquired company LiveJournal, Inc., that owns all assets of service LiveJournal, from company Six Apart.
LiveJournal Inc will continue its activity in San Francisco, the USA. The company will manage and operate LiveJournal. It is expected, that 9 employees of Six Apart working with service of LiveJournal, will work in the new company. Six Apart remains with staff of about 150 employees all over the world.
The cost of LiveJournal is undisclosed. SUP and Six Apart companies have confidential clause that does not allow them to disclose financial conditions of the transaction, as it is informed in the official press release of SUP.

However, experts have estimated that in the nearest future the cost of LiveJournal could reach $100 mln. But today the growth of quantity of users has stopped, and, probably, the transaction sum could make u from $20 to $40 mln.
LiveJournal (or LJ) is Internet service for placing of on-line diaries, assuming possibility of the publication of notes and their commenting by readers. Service was founded on March, 18th, 1999 by American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick. In 2005 company Six Apart acquired Danga Interactive, the management company of LiveJournal. As of July 6th, 2007, in LJ were registered more than 13 million users. By "Yandex" estimations, in the autumn the quantity of Russian-speaking users of LiveJournal made 610 000 people. Without advertising incomes LiveJournal makes approximately $4,5 mln a year. As Cnews informs, presently the number of Russian-speaking subscribers of LJ is about 1,35 mln people. About 523 000 of them are active ones. As of today in all 1,7 mln active users are registered in LiveJournal. The total amount of LJ users is estimated as 3,9 mln people.
SUP is a company created by businessman Alexander Mamut and American media manager Andrew Polson.

Russian segment of LiveJournal passed into SUP ownership last year. In October, 2006 the official contract with Six Apart was signed. According to this contract SUP got the rights of development and service of Cyrillic segment of LJ. Today in LiveJournal there is about 30 % of Russian-speaking users from the general audience of bloggers all over the world. Only for last year their number has increased twice.

SUP promises to simplify the process of registration and navigation, to modernize system of tags and special forbidding labels, to make easier communication between users of LJ, to make use of widgets accessible.

As it is said in press release, SUP has made more than one hundred changes in LJ code, meant for the program errors correction, they have added new possibilities and removed some restrictions; integrated service with a variety of leading media and online platforms; have started a new platform for ratings and navigation which gives constantly updated report of everything new, interesting and popular contained in LJ; and also, have extended the functionality given to those who use LJ by cell phone.

In this way, Russian owners of LiveJournal will try to add to Internet blogs service more functions which will strengthen its role of a social network.
The founder of service Brad Fitzpatrick noted that he was glad that LiveJournal was acquired by SUP. As he said, he would have more influences as a member of the board, than earlier. Besides, Fitzpatrick considers that SUP wants to invest great resources in development of products for LiveJournal.
Foreign users in turn didn’t take the result of the transaction too actively. Company SUP is not well-known abroad yet.

Meanwhile, answering expected fears concerning the change of the owner, LiveJournal informs that the personal information of users of LJ will be still kept in the USA, and its distribution will be regulated in conformity with the American legislation. The founder of service Brad Fitzpatrick declared that SUP employees have no access to the restricted information. As he said, that they even have no wish to have it, as they understand, if bloggers know, that someone can get to know all restricted information, they won’t simply trust the serving company.

In LJ the independent supervisory board is created, it should watch conformity of service work principles. The board has already included Brad Fitzpatrick. It is also informed, that users will be included into the supervisory board too, and two persons will be defined by means of voting.