This is why activist hedgefunds are lining up to destroy Yahoo and make a buck. The board clearly complained about Marissa bailing out failed silicon valley startups for millions. Messageme was an unoriginal product created by people with a favorable track record but the actual product had nothing to offer users except growth hacking by using the facebook friends graph api. Spending millions on this aquihire makes no sense.
What Yahoo needs is a core product that is a big win, Marissa said Tumblr would bring this, but instead we have seen competition on mobile increase and time across social media and blogging apps fragment. We have seen them lose their weather app monopoly on ios and yahoo mail on mobile is not gaining traction. Across the hot core areas being, search, social, cloud services, document services, smart hardware and artificial/assisted intelligence, yahoo is nowhere to be seen. Yahoo needs to seize the initiative and focus on a core competency and win big.
Snapchat at a $10 billion valuation has too much risk for someone that needs a big win. It really seems like snapchat investors are running some kind of pump and dump scheme the way they pushing this valuation. As things stand Snapchat has to go public to make good on a $10b valuation.