Performancing Pulls PayPerPost Deal
Posted by Kirk M on 06 Jan 2007 | Tagged as: Blogging
On December 30th I posted a short article about PayPerPost acquiring Performancing.com. In the deal, PPP was buying the name, "Performancing Metrics" and Performancing Exchange services. The Partners Ad Network, the PFF (Performancing for Firefox) blog editor add-on for Firefox and the Performancing community itself was to stay together and be rebranded under another different name and moved to a new domain; the PFF add-on being renamed ScribeFire in the process. This deal has since been pulled:
After much discussion, we've decided that the deal proposed by PayPerPost just isnt right for us or our community. It's regrettable that we should part ways as I still feel that Dan and Ted are stand up guys breaking new ground, but in the end, the deal was just not right
for them or us.
After an overwhelmingly negative response by Performancing's community, Nick Wilson, on January 5th (yesterday as a matter of fact) announced that the deal was not going to go through and within the post's following comments, that the Metrics service would be shut down on Wednesday, January 10, 2007. The Metrics code will then be revamped and released to the community as open source which was one of the alternatives considered earlier when the owner's of Performancing came to the sad realization that they no longer had the means to support this excellent service as stated in Nick's November 15th, 2006 post; Trimming Startup Fat.
What will happen to to Performancing now? As I understand it the name will stay put and the Partners Ad Network will continue to be developed. However, the blog editor–PFF, although still part of Performancing, will be rebranded as "ScribeFire" and moved to it's own domain. And though nothing was mentioned about the Exchange service in Nick's post, I'm assuming that it will continue under the original Performancing name as well.
The initial community response about this decision, although too early to really tell yet, has been very positive with a sprinkling of comments from the disappointed few. One of the options to the now defunct Metrics is FeedBurner's new Blog Stats service which has just hit the streets as Nick also suggests in his post:
Feedburner as Alternative for Metrics
If you're a Metrics user and don't want to wait around till the OS version of Metrics is developed (and this could take some time…), I highly recommend Feedburners Blog Stats which has just gone live. Dick and the FB guys are good friends of Performancing and I can't think of a better place to send the Performancing Metrics users.
As it currently sits, the ScribeFire website is up and running as you might well know if you followed the link, and shows a default "under construction" type page with a link to the PFF editor on Mozilla's add-on page for the Firefox browser. The editor is still named Performancing for obvious reasons and I'm guessing that the release of the highly anticipated version 1.4 will carry the ScribeFire name at that time. Personally, I'm looking forward to the updated version and it's promised new functions. I've been using this little gem of an editor for my "pinch hit" posting since the beginning and since "pinch hitting" makes up over half my posting overall, I can honestly report that it works just fine albeit some minor quirks here and there.
For the rest of Performancing we'll just have to wait and see. Without the Metrics "monkey on their back" (metrics systems like the one they ran takes literally tons of work and resources to keep it up and running properly), I'm sure the crew at Performancing will have a bit of an easier time of things and although I originally supported their decision in selling to PayPerPost I can't fault them for pulling out either. Metrics had to be lost one way or another and the real credit lies in Nick Wilson and Patrick Gavin, the owners of Performancing, continuing to listening to the voice of their community that they had worked so hard to put together in the first place instead of plowing ahead with what may have turned out to be a very bad deal for them.
This is one company that I hope does well in 2007.
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