at this rate
they won't have to wait much longer until all their money goes away!
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 …
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.
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
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.