ReviewMe Owner Sells Performancing Assets to PayPerPost

Early this morning Techcrunch scooped a story on the sale of certain assets from Performancing to PayPerPost. Here is the press release from Business Wire with all the “formal” details.

Here is the lowdown: PayPerPost is acquiring the Performancing Metrics and Exchange features and the Performancing for Firefox blog editor and Performancing Partners ad technology will be retained and launched under new brand names.

What makes this interesting is that one of the owners of Performancing is Patrick Gavin who is also co-founder of Review Me, a competitor to PayPerPost. Patrick was nice enough to provide me some of the inside scoop “off the record” as well as this “official” comment:

“Although ReviewMe and PPP both fall into the emerging “paid post” industry we don’t view PPP as a direct competitor. ReviewMe is focusing on a high quality marketplace of some of the top blogs online. Our advertisers are looking to build buzz and traffic while getting an honest review of their product or service. We feel this approach is exclusive to the ReviewMe marketplace and sets us apart.”

This is a smart distinction I think. As a second entrant to the paid review category, ReviewMe has focused on positioning itself as an advertising and branding tool that gives advertisers access to blogs based on measures of quality such as traffic rankings and incoming links, rather than by category or topic alone.

ReviewMe parent, Text Link Ads was acquired by MediaWhiz in November of this year.