PayPerPost No Longer Acquiring Performancing Assets

Posted on January 5, 2007

PayPerPost recently announced the acquisition of some Performancing assets. Now PayPerPost says the Performancing deal is no more.

After much discussion and heartache we have decided to walk away from the Performancing deal. We listened to our Posties and other Metrics users, dug into the Metrics platform and regretfully found that it wasn't what we were looking for right now.
The decision has been made by Nick at Performancing to make the Metrics platform Open Source and I believe that is a wise decision. Nick is a great guy and I wish him much luck with the other aspects of Performancing.com. Nick did what he could to keep the hosted version of Metrics running, but in the end it just wasn't a fit

Sometimes deals do fall through but it was unusual to see them issue a press release and then a retraction from the deal. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has slamed PayPerPost calling it "Amateur hour."

Whatever happened, this isn't pretty. After the deal was announced, Performancing moved their non-acquired assets to a new domain name and re-launched that service. They certainly stopped talking to other potential acquirors, given that the deal was officially announced. In merger-land, this is what's known as "being left at the altar" because everyone down the road who you talk to will want to know why the previous deal exploded.

Performancing should have had a more nailed down acquisition agreement, so they aren't entirely blameless.

Nick Wilson has a post on Performancing.com about how the blog statistics package called Metrics (that PayPerPost originally intended to buy) will now be open source.