Acquia, which offers a commercial version of the Drupal content management system, is buying Mollom, which provides spam-prevention and other content cleansing capabilities. The companies have many things in common, not the least of which is that they share a founder in Dries Buytaert.
The goal of the convergence is to build a robust content moderation platform that will let organizations that host multiple sites moderate content for all of them from a single dashboard, said Bryan House, VP of product marketing for Burlington, MA.-based Acquia.
Mollom uses machine learning to evaluate user-submitted content including comments and videos to make sure it’s legit before it posts. To do so, it first it performs text analysis which catches much of the spam, but if it can’t determine whether the submission is for real, it triggers a CAPTCHA process, said Bryan House, VP of product marketing for Burlington, MA.-based Acquia. Mollom competes with offerings from Akismet and Impermium, a startup founded by Mark Risher, the former “spam czar” of Yahoo.
Mollom which works with other content management platforms will continue to do so, House said. Acquia, which competes with content management systems from Adobe and others, sports some pretty big customer names including Twitter, LinkedInStanford University and Intel.
The buyout was partly done to make “Drie’s life a little easier so he doesn’t have to manage two companies but also to accelerate the product roadmap,” House said.
“A lot more digital marketers are using Drupal because it offers content publishing as well as social and community features. They love that but also need a quality experience without being overloaded with spam. We’re working so companies like Time Warner Music — can get a way to moderate content across all their sites from a single dashboard,” he said.
Buytaert’s Mollom co-founder Benjamin Schrauwen will continue to lead Molom product development and will serve on the Acquia board. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user basketman23
