After putting together a clever post grading Google’s acquisition progress over the years, Joe Sinkwitz from the Pay Loan Affiliate Blog has put together another report card grading acquisition behavior. This time it is for Yahoo! The Yahoo! Acquisition Report Card reaches back to their first acquisition of Net Controls in September 1997 to its most current acquisition of Right Media in April 2007.
Here is a sneak peek at a few of the grades given.
- GeoCities acquired in May 1999 – MIXED
Good in that this property held more promise than Google’s Blogger purchase. Bad in that it was never made a priority and exists side by side Yahoo 360
- Broadcast.com acquired in July 1999 – GOOD
The cost was high, but for a “media” company, this represents an important purchase in terms of playing in a future channel (This is the one that made Mark Cuban rich).
- Overture acquired in October 2003 – GOOD
Yahoo’s best purchase, profit wise, but still wasn’t given the attention it needed…and now is second fiddle to Adwords.
- del.icio.us acquired in December 2005 – MIXED
This is a very promising social bookmarking site that is heavily used, but if Yahoo doesn’t allow it to keep innovating and doesn’t share data with it from other social media sources, what will happen?
- MyBlogLog acquired in January 2007 – BAD
$10M for a widget that is slowly made into a heavily spammed social networking tool?
On how they have done overall, Joe says, “So far, most of the purchases, from the outsider’s point of view, were made…well, simply because they were available. One would hope that an acquisition is made to bolster core search technologies, or expand advertising reach (given that Yahoo is more of a media company than a search company), or perhaps to extend web accessibility value chains and make sense of all the data. Unfortunately, this just didn’t happen, since Yahoo’s strategy, just looking above, has been to buy first and ask questions later.”
Now that we have Google and Yahoo! out of the way, can we expect report cards on Microsoft and Ask next? I certainly hope so. 😉
