Think Partnership, a provider of online and offline marketing and ad services, has signed a letter of intent to acquire IceRocket, the blog search engine founded by billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban. The deal is expected to close within two months, on financial terms that were not disclosed.
The two-year-old IceRocket offers real-time search of blogs and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. Under Cuban’s direction and that of IceRocket CEO Blake Rhodes, the company has focused on technological innovation, including tactics for detecting and removing spam blogs created solely to earn ad revenue or improve Web site rankings—for which Cuban coined the term “splogs”. Rhodes will retain his post after the acquisition is complete.
The primary intent of the purchase is to combine IceRocket’s blog-search capacities with the ad-serving platforms operated by Litmus Media, which Think bought earlier this month for about $13 million in cash and stock. The company expects to integrate Litmus’ pay-per-click search ad network, click-fraud prevention platform, affiliate marketing network and other online shopping tools into its portfolio of Web marketing services.
“IceRocket will provide Think Partnership with an innovative platform to help our advertisers leverage the rapidly increasing traffic generated by the popularity of blogs,” Think president Scott Mitchell said in a statement.
