YouTube Founders Buy Social Media Analytics Company Tap11

YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have made another buy for their new “information discovery service” AVOS, which recently acquired Delicious from Yahoo. For an undisclosed price, they’ve picked up Tap11, a social media analytics company used by brands.

In a press release the purchase was explained as a means to help recommend content to Delicious users.

We plan to leverage our Volume™ algorithm to fully measure the impact of content consumed and shared across the social ecosystem,” said Braxton Woodham, Tap11’s CTO. “In combination with Delicious.com, we will be able to provide consumers and publishers with deep, relevant insights and recommendations.”

Tap11 emerged from Zannel, a mobile social networking start-up founded in 2006 that had focused on video early on. Throughout its various incarnations, the San Francisco-based company had raised $16 million from US Venture Partners, Palomar Ventures and Alloy Ventures.

Tap11 had eight employees as of March. AVOS said it is retaining Tap11 CEO Adam Zbar as head of business operations & strategy and CTO Woodham as head of engineering, but didn’t mention the others.

Here’s a video from a recent GigaOM conference where Woodham describes Tap11 as the “Omniture of the Real-time Web.”