14 DAY TRIAL // As Yahoo announced the acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion (€856 million), but also that of another ten startups only since Marissa Mayer joined the company, many can’t help but think back of some past buyouts Yahoo performed.
One of the biggest transactions Yahoo ever did was in 1999, when they bought Geocities for over $4 billion (€3.1 billion). However, what was once a free service that hosted personal home pages for users from all over the world, got closed down in 2009.
To date, this is one of Yahoo’s biggest failures in terms of acquisitions.
Since Yahoo made some new announcements regarding Flickr, it’s worth to mention this buyout as well. In 2005, Yahoo bought the photo-sharing network for a reported $35 million (€27 million). However, soon after, the service lost some of its glam and many blame Yahoo for this.
Alibaba Group, China’s largest e-commerce company also proved to be interesting for Yahoo. They bought 40 percent of the company’s stake for $1 billion (€770 million) in 2005. One of the first things Marissa Mayer did when she joined the company was to sell some of its steak.
Yahoo only owns about 24 percent of the company, but this is one of the best acquisitions the company performed and selling out some of its shares gave Yahoo the liquidities it needed for some important acquisitions over the past few years, including Tumblr.
It’s also worth to mention the fact that Yahoo tried to purchase a stake in Dailymotion, the French YouTube rival. However, after the country’s government opposed the purchase, the deal went south.
The main reason behind the opposition was the fact that Dailymotion is owned by France Telecom, in which the state still has some shares. And they don’t want to give away a native company on the hands of an American company.