Google buys Wildfire

The exits of Buddy Media and Wildfire are related to Facebook introducing Timeline to Pages.

If you assume they were notified of the change in early 2012, and the change happened in March/April, and a deal of this size taking a few months to close, you can see how this deal (and the Buddy Media one) are likely directly related. The change also coincides with WF and BM both announcing ad-related pivots the day before Facebook announced their Timeline change (source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wildfire-announces-new-capa... and http://www.marketwatch.com/story/buddy-media-announces-brigh...).

The Pages change destroyed many companies. The week that the change was forced, I took a screen shot of the top app losers on socialbakers. Check it out yourself: http://i.imgur.com/C3zSQ.png . BandPage, for example, lost 90% of its traffic in 60 days. Wildfire apps saw their user base gutted as well. I remember looking up the stats for a few of their apps a month later and saw their app install base had fallen huge double digit percentages. It's hard to see exactly how companies like WF were impacted, but I think the Timeline change gutted their unstoppable growth and forced them to exit while things were still looking bright.

And this, in my opinion, helps explain why they took a relatively small exit of $250M (given the larger $689M of BM).

That's my guess at the situation.

( Edit: The reason I have this info handy is because I looked into this in depth a few months back: http://www.michikono.com/2012/03/22/facebook-is-okay-with-hu... )

You forgot Context Optional (acquired by Adobe earlier this year)

In the near future, I see YC companies PageLever & Crowdbooster on that list.

Social media marketing for medium-sized to enterprise businesses. Ex. Software subscription that a company like Pepsi would use to manage the social properties/promotions for all their beverages.

They have utilities to run marketing campaigns (sweepstakes, like campaigns, ads etc) on primarily Facebook but also other social media.

From her Facebook:

I'm in Israel on Birthright and I just found out that I'm now a Google employee. Not gonna lie... This feels pretty awkward, but I also feel very proud to be a part of the Wildfire team on this exciting day for Alain and Victoria.

She has 10,500 subscribers. I'm sort of fascinated by that- I wonder how much she is worth to Wildfire just by virtue of who she is?

Broken on the - wait for it - Google Nexus 7.

What a sad joke..

I loved WildFire in the past, deployed a couple of servers (even before they changed the name to wildfire), but I refuse to read a crappy, broken, useless blog post. So no details for me - and a reminder to ignore links to a blogging platform that shows a couple of tools (screwdriver etc?) before it gives you misformatted content.

It seems there are some random elements that are set to fixed position, when they really shouldn't be. I imagine it will be fixed very shortly -- it would be odd if nobody at Google has noticed it yet.

It's also all kind of broken for me in a 1024x768 window. Scrolling the article scrolls it over top of the title but under the bar below the title. meh.

Good for wildfire!

because your window is tiny.

I had the same thing happen to me too.

Unless this is a very expensive aqui-hire, it does complicate the current narrative that Facebook marketing is without value.

I suppose it means that a bunch of the tools that made Facebook attractive to marketers are now owned by a primary competitor to facebook.

I had no idea this was a New Zealand founded company until I saw this as news on the NZ Herald website.

Great to see a Kiwi tech startup seeing this kind of success!

They hit me up last spring and I briefly considered moving out there to join them. Surprise, surprise!

Blogspot is broken in a special way for each platform. It's sweet, really.

When you comment, would you please add something constructive to the discussion that others may find useful? Your quick statement doesn't give any reasoning as to why it caught you off guard, what you expected instead, how you believe this may affect future acquisitions, etc. If you have that knowledge, please share (or hold these little surprises to yourself). Thank you!

They were making tons of money and a majority of their funding was untouched. Solid.

It's not a consumer product. Anyone in the industry knows the name Wildfire.

The world does not revolve around you :-(