Acquisition Strategy eBay acquired online ticket marketplace, StubHub for $307 million in May 2007. It also acquired social bookmarking discovery service, StumbleUpon, for $75 million. These are mostly acquisitions by eBay to strengthen its verticals and community features. Going forward we could see eBay making many more acquisitions to strengthen its key verticals, but also
Acquisition Strategy Yahoo! has made several acquisitions this year, primarily in display advertising. The key acquisitions were MyBlogLog, Right Media, BuzzTracker, Rivals.com, Zimbra and BlueLithium. Of these, RightMedia and Blue Lithium are good moves to consolidate its Ad Networks position, but Zimbra, in my opinion, is not a good acquisition. I feel Yahoo! can improve
Acquisition Targets NYT has been making small investments and acquisitions in the online space for the past few years, tipping its toes into the online waters. The Company’s biggest acquisition in this space has been About.com in March 2005, which has been paying off handsomely. The Company has partnered with Monster which now powers the
Acquisition Targets McClatchy’s strongest asset is CareerBuilder. Though CareerBuilder is the number one job site in the US it lacks community features and McClatchy along with its partners could consider acquiring professional networkin sites like LinkedIn, Xing, etc., which have very good community features to enhance CareerBuilder. Sequoia Capital, Greylock, the European Founders Fund, and
By Danny Cohen, Guest Author How time flies… It seemed to me that I just finished complied the August deals in Israel, and September just flew by. As expected, the investment activity in Israel during September did not slow down. Benchmark announced their investment in Broadlight, and Partech lead a round in PowerID, a spinoff
Acquisition Targets Gannett doesn’t have much of a presence in the Online Personals or Dating space. It could look at acquiring a site as a large portion of the newspaper personals have shifted from print to the Internet and Gannett should preserve its share of the pie. Gannett could consider acquiring sites like, OkCupid, Engage,
While we are on the topic of PlaceID and PeopleID, I should tell you about my recent visit with Plaxo’s CEO Ben Golub, and VP of Marketing John McCrea. Ben Golub was, prior to Plaxo, the CMO of Verisign. Ben’s first Silicon Valley job was cutting apricots in an orchard which was paved over to
Acquisition Targets Over the years, News Corp. has been acquiring businesses that would help it close the gaps in its portfolio. The MySpace acquisition helped it to leapfrog in the social networking space and with the recent acquisition of Dow Jones it will emerge as a leading player in the financial news and information space.