This news kind of blew me away when I read it.

Fresh in my inbox, advertising marketplace PayPerPost announced it has “signed a Letter of Intent to acquire select assets of Performancing LLC, operator of Performancing.com”

Although the acquisition cost was not mentioned, PayPerPost will gain blogging-related technologies such as Performancing Metrics, a free blog analytics service, and Performancing Exchange, an online “classifieds” for bloggers.
Here’s what the 2 technologies do:

Performancing Metrics, is a free service tailored for bloggers to track visitor stats, including AdSense auditing, for their blogs. The platform, currently in beta, reports blog visitors, blog comments and ad clickthroughs.

Performancing Exchange is a free online marketplace for companies, blog sites and others wishing to employ professional bloggers. The classifieds match bloggers and employers for short and long-term relationships.

What’s Performancing?
Launched in 2005, Performancing.com is a respected name in the blogging industry with a community of about 28,000 professionals.

Exluded from the PayPerPost acquisition are the:

• Performancing for Firefox blog editor technology
• Performancing Partners ad technology.

This deal will provide interesting opportunities for bloggers to further expand their monetization options.
It looks like 2007 will see more online companies engage in mergers and acquisitions, especially if there’s a synergistic element to the transaction.

Here’s the PayPerPost announcement