Dublin- and Rome-based blog network and Demand Media (NYSE: DMD) lookalike Populis is buying its second blog network of the year.
Mokono, for which Populis is paying €8.2 million, is Germany’s largest blog network, claiming 14 million monthly uniques and 700,000 registered blogs across 13 European countries and Canada.
Populis, which previously had 26 million monthly uniques (source: comScore (NSDQ: SCOR), January 2011), is buying Mokono for traffic growth and its advertising approach, which includes social ads, video seeding and placing product reviews in member blogs.
Populis rebranded from GoAdv last fall in a bid to be seen as a kind of European Demand Media…
The company’s online article contributors had already published 15,000 articles per month, written by 1,000 writers, across its 500 websites, plus through Excite Europe, the BetterDeals portfolio of niche consumer guides and the blog networks Nanopublishing and Blogosfere.
Then, this January, it acquired the 44-strong Italian blog network Blogo from Italy’s Dada group.