Posts for Tag: buyout

A quick weigh-in on Google and Twitter

News has been swirling around the rumored Google-Twitter hook up. Seems like it's losing steam and may eventually just become a regular business/product development deal. I'd say the later makes more sense given that Twitter doesn't need to be bought and is just dipping its toes in the world of revenue generation. Google's got the advertisers, Twitter's got the inventory so it makes more sense for Twitter to remain independent and see if it can't make some of its own dough. They can always go back to testing the sell out waters in another year or so. Given their momentum and traffic growth, they won't be losing market value by waiting. Plus if they can rope Yahoo into acquisition discussions next year (when the stock should have hopefully gone up a little more), it could only help stir up the froth. Also, let's not forget that Microsoft might be interested at that point.

What would you do if you lost $30 billion?

Yahoo! is tanking on yesterday's confirmations from Jerry Yang and Steve Ballmer that the rumors of a new buy-out deal by Microsoft were indeed false. Yahoo!'s currently valued at about $16 billion, a far cry from the $46 billion that Microsoft had offered. The question now is, in this bad economic climate, how long will it take for Yahoo! (if at all) to reach that valuation on its own? 2 years? Maybe 4 years?

The big bet they are making is that YOS is going to blow up. I'm not necessarily sure being a platform translates into significantly higher reveneus/profits. It almost seems as if they want to get more people to interact with them in more of a Facebook style. To my knowledge, Facebook still hasn't found a way to effectively monetize all of its traffic.

I think they should take a page out of Google's book and copy AdSense but make it more open and transparent. As a former AdSense customer, it's a pretty cryptic system. "Just put this script up and trust that we'll pay you something." Yahoo! could improve upon this by treating publishers like partners and not kids. Yahoo! is at the point where they've got nothing to lose so why not try anything and everything?