Randy Sells R|Mail To NBC
Randy Morin announced last week that he sold his R|Mail service to NBC. R|Mail, a two year-old service which sends RSS updates via email (and features InsideMicrosoft as its 14th most popular feed) and has over 50,000 users, obviously caught the fancy of NBC Universal, and that means another blogger is getting a great payday. Congratulations, Randy! Lets hope R|Mail’s new home respects it and puts some money into growing it.
Good work, Jason, getting what appears to be the exclusive interview revealing the sale.
Interestingly, two months ago, Randy ran an expirement aggregating all NBC RSS feeds as an OPML file, and recommending them in Rmail emails. Crazy speculation time, but maybe NBC saw some real good returns from that experiment, and saw an opportunity to gain new readers. If Rmail users are good marketing other feeds to as recommended feeds, NBC’s got a great base to promote its content, and maybe to sell ad space to others as well.
No matter what their motivations, big congrats to Randy, who definitely deserves it.
R|Mail easter egg: On R|Mail’s Join page, there’s a checkbox for “Allow spammers to email me”. Its a good joke on similar, less obviously worded checkboxes on many web forms, and don’t worry, you won’t get spammed, just berated for not being careful enough.
To subscribe to receive InsideMicrosoft via email, head here. For InsideGoogle, go here.
Nice catch on the “Allow spammers to email me.” Thanks! Not a great payday, this is mostly to get a good product in a great company’s hands.
Comment by Randy Charles Morin | April 30, 2007