the Technorati business model

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on April 15, 2004

Bloggers love Technorati as it keeps track of fresh links between weblogs. Technorati is indeed a wonderful service as it is fast and simple. But I still wonder about the business model of this site. Clearly searching the "World Live Web" is a niche that Google is servicing with lesser quality. The Technorati FAQ says:

"Is searching the Live Web different than searching the Wide Web

Yes. Most of the World Wide Web is static, updated only occasionally, and not syndicated. That is, when changes are made, no notifications goes out. So familiar search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) have to send out "crawlers" or "BOTS" to examine every possible site (Google searches over 3 billion of them) to see what's there and what's changed. Technorati, on the other hand, receives notifications from "live" syndicated sources, includes them within our index within minutes. We monitor the World Live Web, and the active content sources that are changing within the hour. This makes Technorati a complementary rather than a competing service."

Mmh, maybe I'm getting something wrong, but in my understanding the Googlebot does exactly the same thing as the TechnoratiBot. Both oft them crawl the listed sites and index the results. Indeed Google has time limitation in showing new back links, but this is partly due to the sheer amount of pages searched. I guess if the weblog world grows Technorati will also find it troublesome to be as fast as today. As of now Technorati is relying on the RSS watch fee as single revenue. Is this a scalable revenue source? Hardly I would guess as there are not that many hyper communicating webloggers out there. Is it an exit play for getting bought by Google? Maybe but than will the USP having faster and more specialized spiders be big enough? We'll see what happens, so far I stay a happy user of this nice tool.