Yahoo nears deal to sell AOL to Bending Spoons for $1.4B | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo nears deal to sell AOL to Bending Spoons for $1.4B

reuters.com

9 pointsdbelson5 comments

Business model so cool that people over here don't even bother commenting anymore.

What the hell is going on with Bending Spoons and all the acquisitions?

They know what they’re doing to acquire an underperforming tech driven asset to improve its performance, and their reputation and fundamentals has given them access to financing to acquire more businesses.

https://sifted.eu/articles/bending-spoons-500m-e-debt-raise

> In an interview with Sifted in April, Ferrari said Bending Spoons is expecting to make revenue north of $1.1bn this year — and all of its businesses are profitable.

> Ferrari also told Sifted in April that Bending Spoons had over $1bn to spend on at least three further acquisitions before the end of the year. The extra €500m is to “grow even faster”, the company confirmed in an email.

It's so weird/fishy even. Performance? Not sure what more you could squeeze out of a bizarrely existing property like AOL. Skeptical of the claim that it's doing well or anything in the younger market. Never see it linked. Has nothing ut other aggregated content on its homepage. Spoons seems to have a portfolio of either basically dead-in-water zombie properties or also-rans services. I guess sell ads on all the things and monetize the user list until the end of time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's the user data. Buy a bunch of properties, correlate across them to find matches of the same person on different services, aggregate, sell to data brokers. Or and probably sell the content to AI companies.

Evernote. Meetup. Brightcove. Komoot. Vimeo.

After buying them they lay off most or all of the staff, because they aren't really going to keep them going, they just need them to keep going long enough to

a. Change the TOS to say "we can sell you data to whoever"

b. hoover up all the data

Reply on news.ycombinator.com