Yahoo, Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is a computer software and Web search engine
founded in 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California,
and it is one of the most visited websites on the Internet, with a
reported 130 million unique users per month. Yahoo receives an average
of 3.4 billion page views per day.
With the massive success of the company and its ability to generate working capital,
it has adopted a strategy of adding to its growth through the
acquisition of companies. Yahoo's first acquisition was the purchase of a
search engine called Net Controls in 1997; as of 2015, the company has
acquired a total of 114 companies.
1. Broadcast.com
Broadcast.com was an Internet radio company founded in 1995 by
Christopher Jaeb, Todd Wagner
and Mark Cuban. The company was one of the
first companies to broadcast live radio on the Internet, providing
sports broadcasts, presidential debates and other events.
The company set what was at that time the one-day record for initial public offerings
(IPOs) by increasing its share price by almost 250%. In April 1999,
Yahoo acquired the company for $5.7 billion in stock and split it into
separate services: Yahoo LAUNCHcast for music streaming and Yahoo
Platinum for video entertainment.
Yahoo now offers Yahoo Platinum's technology in two new services:
Yahoo High Speed Internet and Yahoo Plus. Yahoo LAUNCHcast has been
renamed Yahoo Music Radio, and it is the company's music presence on the
Web.
2. Overture Services
Overture Services, formerly GoTo.com, was one of the first companies
to offer a pay-per-click search service. With this service, advertisers
could bid on how much they wanted to pay to appear at the top of search
results in response to specific keywords. An advertiser paid the company
every time a user clicked on an advertised search link to its website.
Yahoo, Overture Services' highest-paying customer, acquired the
company in 2003 for $1.63 billion. This was a huge acquisition for
Yahoo, since it allowed the company to monetize its search function.
Since the acquisition, the company was renamed Yahoo Search Marketing.
It was the first time Yahoo offered a successful pay-for-placement
service.
3. Tumblr
Tumblr is a microblogging service and social networking
website founded by David Karp. The platform lets users post multimedia
and other forms of content in the form of short blog posts. Users can
follow other blogs as well as maintain their own. Tumblr hosts over 252
million blogs, and it is headquartered in New York City.
The company has been able to realize incredible growth since its
inception in 2007, when the service gained 75,000 users in its first two
weeks. Since then, Tumblr has had exponential growth in terms of
bloggers and followers. In May 2013, Yahoo announced that it had reached
an agreement to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion in a cash-only
acquisition. Karp has remained as CEO, and the deal allowed Yahoo to
increase its social presence through one of the biggest social media and
blogging platforms in the world.
4. BrightRoll
BrightRoll is a programmatic video advertising platform that was
founded in 2006. The company is headquartered in San Francisco,
California, and it has offices throughout the world. The BrightRoll
platform is the top delivery system for digital video ads, and it
manages and measures ad campaigns across Web, mobile and television.
According to comScore, BrightRoll is the leader in reaching the
highest numbers of unique users in the United States and is ranked among
the top companies in video ads served. The platform provides a
real-time marketplace for brands, agencies, agency trading desks,
demand-side platforms and ad networks to connect with digital audiences
through video ads.
Yahoo purchased BrightRoll in 2014 for $640 million. This gives Yahoo one of the best ways to monetize its online content.
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