M&A: Yahoo Acquires Associated Content
May 18th, 2010 | Published in News
Yahoo! the worlds largest online media company, has just closed a deal to buy Associated Content — a huge web farm for text, image and video media that is created by low-cost freelancers — for slightly more than $100 million.
Yahoo bought the company to leverage its content business to extend its leadership and build upon their global properties to deliver personal relevant content in a scalable and efficient manner.
According to a statement from Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. “Combining our world-class editorial team with Associated Content’s makes this a game-changer,” she said. “Together, we’ll create more content around what we know our users care about, and open up new and creative avenues for advertisers to engage with consumers across our network.”
In the past, Yahoo’s content strategy has been focused on creating high-quality, more expensive content, such as original online video programming from former NBC president Ben Silverman and news coverage from the Associated Press. While the user-generated media on Associated Content represents a marked step down from these other sources, it also represents a long-term strategy that will pump Yahoo’s network full of more content at much lower costs.
Associated Content was founded by Luke Beatty in Denver, Colorado, in 2005. Luke, who developed search advertising and taxonomy solutions at WAND, Inc. before founding AC, envisioned a business that would open the content economy to the world by allowing anybody to publish content in any form. Today, with its vast library of unique multimedia content, diverse community of Contributors and scalable platform, Associated Content provides consumers, brands, and publishers with a wide range of quality content.
For more information, please see the press release and the FAQ.
Happy Reading
SMI!
