JupiterMedia CEO Alan Meckler made an intriguing post in his blog announcing a refocusing on B2B content, tradeshows and acquisitions. He called the post JupiterWeb Rising.

One thing we can read from this is that Alan’s mention of acquisitions means that JupiterWeb is going to be aggressive in becoming a major player in online B2B publishing and tradeshows.

Alan Meckler’s history of purchasing B2B eBusiness and webmaster focused sites is legendary. Alan and his team purchased possibly more than a hundred websites from 1996 - 2001. One of them included my first web startup, NewsLinx in late 1998.

I worked for Meckler Media, which then changed to internet.com from 1998 to 2000. Much of Alan’s executive staff, which directed their acquisition push, is still there including the President of JupiterMedia Chris Cardell and their Editor in Chief Gus Venditto. Curiously, Chris Elwell, who is in charge of JupiterWeb is leaving the company November 3 to start his own company.

The mention of tradeshows by Alan indicates to me that Alan sees an opportunity to recreate the huge success he had with Internet World which he sold for a quarter billion dollars to Penton Media on the day I first met him and his staff in 1998. JupiterMedia was also of course the owner of the Search Engine Strategies conferences, which they sold only last year to Incisive Media for $43 million.

The face of SES Danny Sullivan recently announced that he is leaving Incisive and stated he will continue to work in the search space. He also told one of our WebProNews reporters that he does not have a non-compete agreement.

Is Alan planning to reenter the search space via Danny? Now that would be interesting…

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Rich Ord
CEO, iEntry, Inc.
Publisher of WebProNews

Posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 4:18 am. Permalink