14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo has been looking to sell Delicious for a few months now. That much has been known, but the latest rumors now have a price for the sale, it's in the $1 million to $2 million range, a bargain basement price for a property that still attracts several million visitors each month.
Delicious may have its loyal following, but Yahoo is not making any money from it and it wasn't going to any time soon. What's more, the social bookmarking system hardly fits in with the new content-driven strategy at Yahoo.
It's no wonder then that Yahoo decided to 'sunset' the service, late last year. When news of the planned shutdown leaked, along with a list of other Yahoo services to be terminated or sold, people were up in arms about Yahoo's plans.
The company later revealed that it wasn't going to shut down Delicious but it was looking for a buyer. If the decision was taken after the uproar or this was Yahoo's plan all along remains a mystery.
Rumors last week indicated that Yahoo was going to get about $5 million for Delicious, but the latest numbers are significantly lower. This shows that Yahoo doesn't really care about making anything on the sale, just handing over the property to someone who may know better what to do with it.
One potential buyer that has been speculated and which seems the most likely is StumbleUpon which offers a similar bookmarking system. Unlike Delicious though, StumbleUpon is undergoing a renaissance of sorts and is more popular than ever.
StumbleUpon has recently raised $17 million from investors, so it can certainly afford Delicious.
The reason for the delayed sale, it seems, has more to do with the technical details than with the economic ones. Delicious was woven into Yahoo's infrastructure is and is heavily dependent on it so the past couple of months have been spent making the whole system run stand-alone.