Acquia Acquires Mollom to Launch First Content Moderation Platform for the Enterprise

BURLINGTON, MA--(Marketwire - Aug 14, 2012) - Acquia, the enterprise guide to Drupal, today announced it has acquired Mollom, a leading provider of content monitoring solutions for user-generated content. Mollom was co-founded by Benjamin Schrauwen and Dries Buytaert, who is the co-founder and CTO of Acquia, and the original creator and project lead for Drupal. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The acquisition will fuel Acquia's continued momentum by expanding its offerings. Mollom's technology is used by Twitter, Sony Music, Tuenti, Radian6, Thomson Reuters, Stanford University and more than 50,000 other web sites. In addition, Mollom's analytics technology will enable Acquia to build the Internet's first social content moderation platform, which will help both Drupal and non-Drupal users filter spam and other unwanted or damaging user-generated content from their web sites. 

Since 2008, Mollom has blocked almost a billion spam messages, and 78 percent of all the comments on the sites it protects are spam.

"Acquia's vision to transform Mollom from an effective spam-blocking solution into the first community-backed content monitoring platform will help our customers quickly understand the qualitative aspects of the user-generated posts on their site -- in addition to removing the unwanted spam," said Benjamin Schrauwen. Benjamin will continue his role as architect and lead developer, and Dries will remain Mollom's General Manager.

Mollom helps organizations maintain the quality of user-generated content posted to their sites through sophisticated machine learning techniques, language analysis and a proprietary reputation system that evaluates and grades content and its authors. When a user posts a comment or other content to a protected web site, Mollom evaluates and scores it in real time based on quality guidelines set by the organization. Mollom incorporates honeypots to trap spam-bots, textual analysis to determine context, and CAPTCHA authentication. The software 'learns' with each instance and has proven to be 99.96 percent effective at blocking spam.

"Acquia is excited about Mollom's strategic direction, with plans to launch the first community-backed content moderation platform. This solution is already available in beta with general availability soon," said Tom Erickson, Acquia CEO. "The growth of the social web has carried with it an explosion of spam and malware, which has been estimated to be as high as 95% of all user-generated content. With Mollom, Acquia continues our commitment to the highest level of security for our customers."

Because Mollom was not built exclusively for Drupal-based web sites, the solution is suitable for any web site that has a social presence. In addition to helping organizations manage large volumes of user-generated content, the solution can also support workflow management for in-house moderation teams.

About Acquia™, the enterprise guide to Drupal
Acquia empowers enterprises with the open source social publishing system Drupal. Co-founded by Drupal's creator in 2007, Acquia helps customers manage their growth and scale their online properties with confidence. Acquia's products, cloud infrastructure, and support enable companies to realize the full power of Drupal while minimizing risk, as it's done for nearly 2,000 enterprise customers including Twitter, Warner Music Group, Turner Sports, World Economic Forum, Stanford University, Mercedes-Benz and NPR. See who's using Drupal at http://www.drupalshowcase.com, and for more information please visit www.acquia.com or call 888-9-ACQUIA.

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