Yahoo Acquires … What’s It Called Again? Oh, Yeah–BuzzTracker
by John Paczkowski
Posted on September 14, 2007 at 1:12 PM PT
Yahoo’s scooped up another small software company to poorly integrate into its product and service offerings. The Internet company has acquired content aggregator BuzzTracker and named its founder, Alan Warms, general manager and vice president of Yahoo News. Purchase price: a reported $5 million. “The decision to sell the business and move to Yahoo! was relatively simple,” Warms wrote in a post to the company blog. “As anyone playing in the online space understands, online media is all about scale. The ability to garner real CPMs, the ability to sell ads directly, the ability to provide innovative solutions to advertisers, all depend on having tens of millions of unique visitors. As the Publisher of BuzzTracker.com and before that RealClearPolitics.com, that point has been drilled into my consciousness over the past two years.”
OK. That explains BuzzTracker’s decision to sell. Now how do we explain Yahoo’s decision to buy? After all, BuzzTracker isn’t exactly leading the market for blog aggregators. In fact, it’s essentially a poor man’s TechMeme and an even poorer man’s Megite. Why buy an also-ran? Apparently, the price was right. “Yahoo had looked at other better-known competitors in the space,” sources tell AllThingsD.com’s Kara Swisher. “But those trendier (and more popular) start-ups apparently had too lofty valuations.”
