Yahoo Nears Investment in Snapchat

Alibaba is a pretty bad example to use, because Yahoo made $9.4 billion because they DID invest in Alibaba early on.

There are strong rumours going around of Yahoo either being acquired by Alibaba or Softbank.

By picking up a share of a very trendy and popular mobile service like Snapchat, this is just more confirmation that they're aiming to be acquired by Softbank. It might have almost nothing at all to do with Snapchat as a business.

It seems like their planned future is to share sponsored snaps with their users. I'm not a fan of this. While I like the idea of snapchat, I have enough problems with their app already... Much more annoyance and I'll just ditch it.

For more perspective on this question, I'd recommend this recent video (~6 min) by Casey Neistat - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKSr6h5-fCU

I think Snapchat is a cool company, and they showed their technical wisdom by building their original messaging service with Java atop App Engine, so they could scale effortlessly and just focus on the product. While this might not sound like wisdom per se it certainly shows more competence than all the tech companies building on top of garbage like node.js or whatever flavor of the month tech mouth-breathers happen to be hyping at the time, and then months later releasing a blog post about how they had to switch their entire architecture to an actually capable system, as if doing stupid things that cause you headaches later and wasting time fixing your broken garbage when you could be working on the actual product instead of doing things right the first time is some kind of engineering feat.

They have 100 million + users(not as small as it seems in these days of throwing around huge numbers), see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_wit...

The offers and valuation they got I assume are based on(aside from their huge funding rounds) the usual vastly overblown targeted userbase analytics advertising blah blah. I say vastly overblown because the revenue potential based on the targeted ads hooplah really isn't what its made out to be. To put this in perspective, Facebook has 10x Snapchat's users and made around $8 billion in revenue last year, so a little over twice of its bid for Snapchat. So unless they planned on putting extra special magic fairy dust ads on Snapchat(a platform of which its dubious what kind of ads will be successful/viable on, if any) after acquiring it, there are better companies out there that they could have acquired if they wanted to increase their earnings.

I think specifically Facebook's offer wasn't based on Snapchat's earning potential, more on the fact that Zuck seems to get antsy when the Facebook empire loses face(pun not intended) to any other platform in the least. He paid $1bil for Instagram when it had 30 million users, way more than it was valuated at at the time. The press made it seem like he alone spearheaded both offers, and that Facebook's board/other execs were barely involved in the decisions.

Google allegedly attempted to outbid Facebook for Snapchat, offering $4bil, which struck me as odd, seeing as their better known recent acquires included a machine learning firm and a company that makes smart home products. I thought Google had learned it's lesson in the social space after the colossal failure that was Google+.

Revenue!? Usually owners realize value by getting a dividend from earnings. Can't believe we're back at this point, again.

"Revenue" isn't the only thing that companies compete for.

Many of these online services companies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo) compete for user timeshare - e.g. you're awake 16 hours a day, how many of those hours are spent under company X's umbrella?

Tumblr had doubled their number of blogs and grown their userbase by 1/3 since being acquired. The jury is still out on whether it was a good or bad investment.

... and Alibaba.

> concept of staying in the game

That's actually the opposite of that concept. WhatsApp actually solved a real problem and aligned closely with Facebook's overall strategy (communication).

maybe they're planning something with flickr? they're both related to photos and sharing...

Weren't they recently valued around $10b[1]? They'd need to grow a lot to make Alibaba-level money on Snapchat. And Snapchat would have to really find a way to monetize eyeballs without losing them.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/27/technology/innovationnation/...

Edit: Apparently the round hasn't closed yet, so they would be a part of the $10b round. I think my point still stands!

Actually, if they had stayed a little longer on Ali Baba, they would've had an even bigger cash-out.

These days it seems to be from investing. Alibaba, now apparently SnapChat.

For what it's worth I have actually started using Yahoo! for the first time again in years. I really like the Aviate home screen replacement for android, which got me hooked on News Digest app, and now I'm using IFTTT to push pictures to flickr automatically because you get 1GB free storage and flickr really has the best photo viewing experience out there. It's way better than Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon Cloud for looking at pictures.

Fairly straightforward: They sell ads (80% of revenue). 75% of them are to folks in the Americas. There is roughly a 50/50 split between search ads and display ads.

The Yahoo search engine is more popular than every product made by a YC company. Combined. Its chief draw is that it is on people's home page or in their toolbar.

For these and other scintillating insights: https://investor.yahoo.net/results.cfm

They're consistent #2 in total unique desktop visitors, and sometimes take over the first spot.

http://www.cnet.com/news/yahoo-tops-the-most-trafficked-web-...

But the answer to your question is indeed "other properties". Finance, News, Sports, Fantasy Sports are consistent category leaders (or make it into top 5 in their respective categories).