Netvision buys biggest Israeli blogging site

Israblog says it has more than a million visitors a month and 300,000 blogs

Netvision yesterday acquired Israel's biggest blogging site, Israblog.

The blogging site had been set up in 2001 by Yariv Habot, who has remained to run it for the last five years. But Habot mentioned in several recent interviews that he received offers for Israblog. He added that none of the offers suited him.

Two years ago, Habot moved the site's storage to Netvision servers under a collaborative arrangement, but he didn't sell the controlling interest.

Netvision, which established the popular Hebrew-language portal Nana in 1999, did not merge Israblog's content into Nana.

Yet during its five years, israblog accumulated a community of tens of thousands of active users. Hundreds of thousands of surfers visit the site each month.

Over the years his personal involvement in the site waned, Habot said in one interview, and volunteers helped him run it.

At present, some 5,000 new blogs are added each month, bringing the site's total to more than 300,000, though it must be said that most are inactive. Israel's population is about 7 million people.

The site claims to have more than a million visitors each month.

Recently Netvision, which belongs to Nochi Dankner's IDB group, merged with the long-distance carrier communications providers Barak and Globcall, to create an entity that controls a third of Israel's Internet service provision and a third of its long-distance market.