E-mail marketing firm Blue Sky Factory has bought RSS and e-mail company RSSFWD, keeping with the current acquisitions trend in the online space exhibited in Google’s Double Click acquisition; Pay Per Post’s purchase of blog-marketing firm Zookoda; and the sale of R-Mail to NBC Universal.
Blue Sky Factory will operate RSSFWD as an autonomous service to complement current offerings. Blue Sky Factory also has plans to integrate some of the service’s features into its own Web-based e-mail marketing platform. The deal is effective immediately. Financial terms were not disclosed.
“There is definitely a wave of consolidation happening across the industry – you see it everywhere,” said Greg Cangialosi, president of Blue Sky Factory, Baltimore, MD. “In this particular space, RSS to e-mail, there has been a flood of activity in recent weeks. This is definitely a ripe time for acquisitions in online marketing, media and technology.”
Other acquisitions in the e-mail marketing space include following Silverpop’s recent acquisition of Vtrenz and Experian’s Cheetahmail’s acquisition of French e-mail marketing firm Emailing Solution.
RSSFWD’s is a free, Web-based service that alerts opt-in subscribers of RSS feeds through e-mail when blogs, podcasts and syndicated RSS feeds that the user has signed up for are updated. The service converts RSS content into HTML e-mail format and deploys updated content directly to the inbox of subscribers. Thirty thousand users currently use the service, deploying four million e-mails a month worldwide.
The acquisition aims to deal with the challenge of user adoption.
“Marketers are aware of the growing rise of RSS and they are also aware of the challenges of user adoption,” Mr. Cangialosi said.
“RSS to e-mail technology is a very complementary tool to offer end users,” he said. “The e-mail industry on its own has shown a lot of support for adding RSS-based solutions to their offerings. It’s clear that RSS and e-mail go very well together as communication and marketing mediums and that moving forward you’re going to continue to see user demand grow for these types of solutions from not only the end user but also the publishers of content.”
