The Tumblr acquisition by Yahoo is smart in so many ways, from an advertising perspective to a “let’s be relevant again” perspective. And pair the Tumblr news with a relaunch of Flickr, and we’re looking at an end result of Marissa Mayer dominating a market where Google has a major weakness — photos.
(Anyone use Picasa lately?)
So as I was digging through the news around the acquisition announcement over the weekend and this morning, I wanted to look deeper into Yahoo’s other social media acquisitions, and the value / life expectancy of each.
Here’s a short list :
- Flickr : $35,000,000 : Alive & well.
- Del.icio.us : $20,000,000 : It’s kind of become a Pinterest copy.
- MyBlogLog : A precursor to Google+, dead.
- Blo.gs : Integrated into Yahoo 360, which died.
- Upcoming.org : Part of Yahoo Local
While reviewing the list of Yahoo acquisitions, one really caught my eye. Back in 2003, Yahoo bought Overture .. the mack daddy of paid search, which powered Yahoo and MSN Search paid results at the time (along with a lot of other search engines, toolbars and parked domains).
Overture was also Goto.com; the FIRST paid search engine, and held the patent rights to paid search (which a court of law decided Google must pay Yahoo/Overture in order to keep AdWords running). At the time, Overture also owned Altavista.com and AlltheWeb search engines.
[Here’s a great write up by Danny Sullivan back when he used to run Search Engine Watch … note to Incisive, might want to update Danny’s avatar].
- In 2003, Yahoo purchased the juggernaut of Overture for $1.6 Billion.
- In 2013, Yahoo purchased Tumblr for $1.1 Billion.
Is one undervalued while one is overvalued, or did Yahoo get an absolute steal back in 2003 after the bubble burst?
