WeddingBee, a wedding blog with 180,000 monthly readers, has been acquired by eHarmony. There are so many of these blogs I can’t keep track, turns out eHarmony thought enough of this one to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
eHarmony is doing a good job of extending the brand into the wedding market, WeddingBee is one of several recent acquisitions into the wedding space.
Several contributors were upset that WeddingBee, who’s founder was against eHarmony not being GLBT-friendly, have quit. Not surprising.
Now that the eHarmony PR team appears to be copy-editing comments on the WeddingBee blog, we’ll see how the editorial tone and content changes over time. Bloggers with new corporate parents go through a cycle, of being elated at the money, taking some much-needed time off, then the realization that they are not as free as they used to be, because a company will say whatever it takes to get a deal done, the bloggers freedom is the last thing they consider when in acquisition talks. Or maybe this deal will be an anomaly and everything will go swimmingly.
Amazing traffic growth at WeddingBee in the past year. Nice job with that. They have more readers than many dating sites have members. Another case of decent editorial and topical content, even though the tone of most wedding blogs annoys me, it must be the overly saccharine happy people, so effusive in their joy and elation (sigh).
The site is overrun with Google ads, hopefully someone with advertising experience at eHarmony will reign in overabundance of mis-targeted ads.
I wonder how they are paying other editors- pay-per-post, performance-based payouts, ads revenue share or some other payment schedule?
Full story at WeddingBee and the comments and unfiltered backstory at the unofficial eHarmony blog.
