back to article Yahoo close to investing $20m in disappearing chat app Snapchat

Yahoo! is close to a deal where it would invest $20m of its Alibaba pot in startup Snapchat, valuing the IM service at around $10bn, according to reports. The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times said that familiar people had told them that Yahoo! had started negotiations with the idea of investing up to $50m, but that …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Tax write off

    Gotta be. There is no way they will see a ROI on that 20 million. Where is the business model to generate an income in snapchat?!

    My nieces and nephews love snapchat, but they'll get bored of it soon enough when the next best thing comes along and this will fall by the wayside

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Tax write off

      It can't be a good investment.

      You're supposed to invest in the company when it's small, and you can see a good return.

      When the bubble is near it's peak it's not really a good idea.

  2. psychonaut

    a mesage to my pension fund manager

    please, in the name of fsm, keep the fund away from things that are valued at stupid prices WHEN THEY DONT MAKE ANY MONEY

    1. wikkity

      Re: a mesage to my pension fund manager

      You beat me to it, this that was all I could think of when I was reading the article.

      1. psychonaut

        Re: a mesage to my pension fund manager

        this is just another case of arseholes selling shit to idiots...seems to be the tech-startup stock market defacto position these days.

  3. Dom 3

    Extrapolation

    Always get a bit narked when I see a small stake in a company extrapolated into a massive valuation. That 20MBuck investment probably has a number of components, of which the actual share-holding is the least valuable from Yahoo's POV. E.g. a look at the source code and internal roadmap, influence over same, direct dial numbers for engineers, blah.

  4. Ralph B

    Was it $20 billion?

    I wonder if it would have been $20 billion before Apple copied the Snapchat picture-expiry functionality into iOS 8 ... ?

  5. User McUser
    Unhappy

    George Orwell was WRONG

    It isn't going to be perpetual war that eats up all the resources that could be put to use bettering society, it's going to be perpetual absurdly over-valued Internet start-ups.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    but whats to stop me taking a photo of the screen?

    $10B my ass

  7. Hubert Thrunge Jr.
    Coat

    Yahoo!

    What! Happened! To! The! Exclamation! Marks! In! The! Title!?

  8. Snapper
    Mushroom

    Snapchat is a .......

    Dot-Com-Bomb all on its own!

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