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Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

Are there any Yahoo acquisitions that haven't been complete disasters?

Flickr and Tumblr haven't been disasters (yet) for users, at least... :)

Flickr stagnated for nearly a decade post-acquisition.

it's ironic because technically Yahoo and their acquisitions are sound. Flickr is still one of the best looking photo sites around, and from what I hear from my Photography friends performs like a champ. Tumblr likewise is a good technological investment. I think the failure has been turning good technology into money, which is where a lot of companies fail. The beauty of Flickr and Tumblr are ruined as soon as you start heaping crap tons of banner ads on every page. But that said you still have to find a way to generate revenue from those investments.

Tumblr was acquired after Marissa Mayer became CEO and one of her goals was to improve acquisitions.

The acquisition of broadcast.com for 5.7B.

That's an expensive domain name but the redirect works :P

Mostly paid in stock

Overture.

Which was kind of like "PayPal buying eBay" in terms of Yahoo!'s core business, but didn't go far enough.

overture succeed in it made google buy much larger , i.e. more expensive when summed, competitors overseas to keep up :D

What are the complete disasters and how did you come to the conclusion that they weren't worth the price they paid?

Genuinely curious.

Broadcast.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com

Made Mark Cuban some money but it never turned a profit for Yahoo and they don't have anything in that space anymore.

You can look at the entire list here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...!

A couple of others that stand out: GeoCities, Zimbra (Yahoo bought it for $350 Mil, sold it to VMware for less who sold it down the road as well), etc.

Well not all the acquisitions were bad.. ViaWeb ;-)

Flurry. Another acquisition that continues to lose money.

brightroll

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