Less than a year ago, affiliate ad network Bloosky acquired Tracking202. At the time, co-founders Wes Mahler and Steven Truong lauded the takeover as a “deal [that] made a lot of sense.” Tracking202, a marketing analytics company for affiliate advertisers, was struggling to rapidly scale up with its limited resources and needed a partner like Bloosky. That was in November 2009. Fast forward to June 2010, turns out the deal didn’t make a lot of sense after all and the original founders are back at the reins.
In his blog post this morning, Mahler did not fully explain why the Blooksy, Tracking202 deal fell apart, but he talked about returning Tracking202
to its roots. “I’m pleased to announced that the original founders of Tracking202 have undone the acquisition and Tracking202 is no longer a Bloosky Interactive company!…We’re bringing back the original Tracking202 culture that many of you have grown to know and fallen in love with. We are going to do our best to make Tracking202 even better starting by redoing everything that Tracking202 is currently.” Mahler, as he points out in his blog, was not a part of the company during the “past few months,” but will now return alongside other members of the original team.
Mahler did not divulge his grand plan for Tracking202′s makeover, but he did hint at “fairly large changes” and the discontinuation of Tracking 202 Pro. Tracking 202 Pro was the company’s paid version of its tracking software, which differed from the free model by offering higher integration with the major pay per click networks and more sophisticated cost tracking analysis.
There’s a lot of unanswered questions here: why did the Bloosky deal disintegrate so quickly (and how ugly was this break-up), how did the founders broker this re-acquisition (also, how much), and what will become of Tracking202? We have an e-mail in to the founders.
Full announcement below:
Tracking202 Has Been Re-Acquired by Original Founders
We have an important announcement to make today. I’m not entirely sure how to bring about this news so I am going to do my best and just come out with it. As many of you may know, Tracking202 was acquired by another company in our space known as Bloosky Interactive last November. However since then, many things have changed. A lot of things happened and as some of you may or may not know, I was no longer part of this company for the past few months. This has all changed now.
Today, I’m pleased to announced that the original founders of Tracking202 have undone the acquisition and Tracking202 is no longer a Bloosky Interactive company! As of earlier this week, we completed a deal with Bloosky to get Tracking202 back. I and a few members of the original Tracking202 team will be heading up the direction of the company moving forward.
We hope to continue innovating in our industry which is in need of great change more than ever. A lot has happened recently both with Tracking202, the affiliate industry and performance marketing space as a whole. We hope to change all of that for the better. We’re bringing back the original Tracking202 culture that many of you have grown to know and fallen in love with. We are going to do our best to make Tracking202 even better starting by redoing everything that Tracking202 is currently.
We are going to be making some fairly large changes to Tracking202, some of which we’ve already began doing. One of the first things we will be doing is discontinuing Tracking202 Pro soon because we feel there are better opportunities for our company to tackle. We will be posting more and more updates on what’s to come so please feel free to stop by our blog for further future updates.
We know we have a lot of work to do ahead of us and we look forward to making things happen for the community and the industry as a whole with these new changes. We do appreciate all of the support you guys have given us throughout the years and we look forward to working with you guys again.
Hello again,
Wes
