Deal summary
SUP, a Russian online media company acquired LiveJournal, a Russian social networking service.
- Russian online media company SUP acquired blogging and community site LiveJournal from Six Apart, giving the company ownership of Russia's most popular blogging site.
- Six Apart was to continue to represent LiveJournal for advertising and sponsorship for at least the following 12 months.
About SUP
SUP was an international online media company, founded in Moscow in mid-2006 by Andrew Paulson and Alexander Mamut. Its ownership was split between Mamut, Kommersant Publishing House and management.
SUP was split into two business divisions, one is SUP Media, which included Gazeta.ru (a popular online news site); Championat.com (an online sports site); and LiveJournal.com (a widely used blogging platform). The other business line was SUP Advertising, which included +SOL (an online sales house which sells SUP's inventory, Russian media sites and foreign media sites including Yahoo, the BBC, Last.fm and a number of newspaper sites) and Victory SA, a digital marketing agency.
In 2013, SUP was merged with Rambler.
About LiveJournal
LiVEJOURNAL, was a Russian-owned social networking service where users could keep a blog, journal, or diary.
American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, American blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick.
Six Apart sold LiveJournal to Russian media company SUP Media in 2007; the service continued to operate out of the U.S. via a California-based subsidiary, LiveJournal, Inc., but began moving some operations to Russian offices in 2009. In December 2016, the service relocated its servers to Russia, and in April 2017, LiveJournal changed its terms of service to conform to Russian law. As with other social networks, a wide variety of public figures use the service, as do political pundits, who use it for political commentary, particularly in Russia, where it partners with the online newspaper Gazeta.ru.
