back to article Yahoo! ready! to! fling! $600m! at! Hulu!

Not content with splurging $1.1bn on cat'n'porn blogging site Tumblr and an undisclosed sum on gaming software firm PlayerScale, Yahoo! now has its wallet set on a bid for video service Hulu. If the reports are true, Marissa Mayer comes from the "spend money to make money" school of business, having already snagged news …

COMMENTS

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  1. Nate Amsden
    Joke

    at this rate

    they won't have to wait much longer until all their money goes away!

  2. Steve Todd
    Stop

    I'm not a Yahoo fan

    But sticking an exclamation mark after every word in a Yahoo headline is getting more than a little tiresome. Time to find a new joke now that el Reg has flogged this one to death?

    1. Oninoshiko
      Alert

      Re: I'm not a Yahoo fan

      Kinda like seeing the same post complaining at the headline on every yahoo story?

  3. thomas k.

    I say ... Go! For! It!

    But only if it means less commercials than they currently show.

    I swear, it's getting almost as bad as broadcast tv, which is why I stopped watching tv all those years ago in the first place.

    When I first started watching Hulu, it was 1 30 sec (or 2 15 sec) commercials per break. Now it's up to 2 minutes, most of the time, though some non-peak times will have less, or maybe that's for non-popular shows.

  4. tempemeaty

    Googleifications...

    Well it's one of the ways Google got into the game in the first place, after all Google bought Youtube. Hopefully Yahoo is doing it right and buying what it really needs and hitting the target well enough to compete now.

    http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-to-acquire-youtube-for-165_09.html

  5. Levente Szileszky
    FAIL

    Good God, stop with this!...

    ...cheesy! lame! attempt! at! being! funny! about! Yahoo!

    Funny, it is not.

  6. Chris Handley 1
    FAIL

    Stop! Using! Exclamation! Marks!

    Jeez, yes we know it's the Yahoo logo\trademark, but every story for Yahoo doesn't need this ridiculous title! It amused me the first time I saw it years ago and that was it.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    From where is Yahoo getting money from?

    I believe that most people now use Google. Does Yahoo have enough users to get billions to spend on these aquisitions? Or it's all shareholders money?

    If they still make money from operations, good for them.

    1. Don Jefe

      Re: From where is Yahoo getting money from?

      That's what I was wondering. If they've had ~$2B sitting in the bank all these years and kept scrooging it when the company was dying someone should be shot. On the other hand who is going to toss that much money at them? Maybe their insane neo-conservative user base is putting up some money...

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They want Hulu for its user tracking...

    AdBlock / Noscript won't help you here :-

    http://www.adotas.com/2011/08/hulu-caught-respawning-cookies-as-etags-enter-tracking-fray/

  9. ADRM
    FAIL

    Yahoo and their past take overs

    Oh great, that means Hulu will be dead in two to three years just like Musicmatch, a great music player then streaming and music selling website. Just like Kofabulator and the Widgets and many other things they screwed up and closed down. Being purchased and taken over by Yahoo is the kiss of death.

  10. tempemeaty

    Of course the base question is can Yahoo search

    Now if Yahoo can pull all this together around a search engine that is better at finding what you're searching for than the current one which only seems to find a scatter-shot mix of unrelated and quasi-related things to your search. then Yahoo might compete again. Maybe asking why Google Search can find search related items better than anyone is something that needs to be center stage now?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Of course the base question is can Yahoo search

      It kind of is, except rather than saying "Why are you better" it's a load of companies bleating about how google is anti-competative and needs to make its service worse for them to compete.

      I'm surprised Yahoo isn't one of them.

  11. Moosh
    Stop

    How on earth does Yahoo have this much money to throw at something in the first place?

    They're a relic from the 90's. They should be dead.

  12. TeeCee Gold badge
    WTF?

    The perfect target.

    At least "Hulu" starts with "Who?", which is what I thought about all their other recent aquisitions.

    This is looking more and more like some sort of strategy to get all the internet's lame duck services in one place, so it's easy to kill off the whole lot at once.

    1. wowfood
      Black Helicopters

      Re: The perfect target.

      That or they're all collected under one roof for a big buyout from Microsoft / Google / Facebook for a discount price once Yahoo finally dies.

      My money is on facebook since many of these are companies Facebook was rumoured to be interested in in the past.

      Also they need a tinfoil hat avatar.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One smart thing Yahoo did years ago was team up with alibaba in China. Then alibaba wanted them out. They sold their shares back to alibaba for many billions. One or two payments have been made, with more to come soon (a year or so?) when alibaba's IPO goes through.

    Basically they sold their share of a huge and growing profitably outfit, and are now spending the proceeds on buying up everything in sight, which they'll fail to amalgamate, and then kill off, like so many other things before. They'd make more money just putting the billions onto the spot money market.

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