Reuters Invests $7 Million in Pluck

Posted on November 15, 2006

Reuters reports that have invest $7 million in Pluck. Pluck offers several blog-related services but recently announced it would be ending its RSS reader. Reuters appears to be the most interested in Pluck's blog syndication service. Pluck runs the BlogBurst blog syndication tool that syndicates blog posts to newspaper websites.

As a provider of syndicated text, pictures and video news, Reuters plans to offer Pluck's BlogBurst blog syndication service to thousands of its media customers worldwide, the London-based company said.
BlogBurst counts U.S. news outlets such as The Washington Post, the Gannett newspaper chain, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Austin American-Statesman as its customers. In Britain, it also links bloggers to the Guardian newspaper site and Reuters sites.
Blog categories covered include news, politics, sports, health, fitness, technology, travel, food and entertainment.
Pluck plans to take advantage of Reuters' investment to expand its services worldwide, starting in Europe and later in Asia, executives of both companies said.

Susan Mernit says it is another sign of blogs continuing to go maintream: "The third reason, though, is that its another data point to show how fully blogging--around since before 2000--is entering the mainstream and becoming an integrated experience with other tools, media, and user generated content platforms."

BlogBurst has managed to grow despite not paying all the bloggers in the syndication network -- some bloggers are happy with the exposure and any resulting traffic that is kicked back to their blog. Pluck did recently launch a rewards program for BlogBurst which pays money to some of the top bloggers. You can read a faq about the rewards program here.