Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to find the thread that binds all of this recent M and A activity together. There have been so many acquisitions of companies big and small, wrapping your head around Yahoo's global strategy is beginning to look like Google's.

Does Yahoo have the engineering prowess to pull off this Multi-faceted hydra strategy? Do they have the management?

It seems news will play a very prominent role in the new Yahoo, but, to my knowledge, this is the first gaming acquisition in a long time.

Whatever happens, perhaps the most interesting thing is that we're talking about Yahoo again. 3-5 years ago many of us had written them off, but at least for the time being they've caught my attention.

Only common thread is both target young audiences

CEO bonus is probably tied to "increase 16-24yr old audience by 100%" and she is doing that as every other yahoo ceo would have.

As a consumer media company Yahoo needs a way to grow it's user base and increase it's reach. My guess is that many of Yahoo's existing users have been loyal to the companies core products (Mail, Finance, Portal, Homepage, etc.) and see no need to switch to the latest and greatest services, but reaching new users has been a problem.

Through acquisitions Yahoo gains valuable consumer media properties (e.g. Tumblr) and also acquires the talent needed to build new properties.

Regardless, if they kept doing "business as usual" they would still generate revenue, but slowly fade into irrelevance like AOL.

Advertising.

Imagine being being able to go to an advertiser and say "we have every important metric on the behaviours and desires of young people".

My guess is that they're not doing a multi-faceted strategy, and are doing these acquisitions to buy some expensive(but good) talent. There's a lot of bad stigma associated with yahoo, so it's possible they have a serious brain drain problem internally.

i wouldn't be surprised if this was less of a multi-market strategy and more of a play to get a games platform for tumblr. just a thought, though.

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