PayPerPost Does About-Face on Performancing Deal

The tech blogosphere is having a goof at the expense of PayPerPost’s recoil from its intended acquisition of blog analytics firm Performancing. The paid blogging service announced on its own blog yesterday the deal is kaput.

Late last month, PayPerPost said it has signed a Letter of Intent to acquire select Performancing assets, planning a technology switchover in mid-January. Performancing’s metrics tracking technology was the gem the firm was after. PayPerPost CEO Ted Murphy at the time told ClickZ News it would “allow us to provide real data about a blogger’s traffic and what’s being clicked on on their blog.”

Evidently, that gem is tarnished in PayPerPost’s eyes. “After much discussion and heartache we have decided to walk away from the Performancing deal,” noted the company’s post, adding the metrics platform was not what it was looking for upon further inspection.

As a result of the about-face, influential tech blogger Michael Arrington called PayPerPost “an increasingly ridiculous startup.”

Performancing has chosen to no longer provide the free blog metrics service which spurred the deal in the first place, instead unleashing it to the Web wild as an open source technology. Whether that decision was made before or after the deal’s demise is unclear.

Performancing also has a network of 28,000 bloggers who run its advertiser partners’ display ads on their sites in exchange for a cut of the ad revenue. According to a statement posted on its site today, it will make that Performancing Partners business the main focus of its Performancing Web domain.

Neither PayPerPost nor Performancing responded to inquiries from ClickZ in time for publication.