Yahoo Acquires Polyvore

http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/31/yahoo-acquires-polyvore/

by praneshp • 11 years ago

42 29 11 years ago

techcrunch.com

nso95• 11 years ago

Yahoo is making me sad, they just can't seem to make progress.

kleer001• 11 years ago

Me too.

I'm not sure how much progress can be made. Even the luminary of Google seems to kinda be floundering from its initial flowering.

gcb0• 11 years ago

who goes out and buy the underdog in a market? why?

so there are a dozen shopping sites. let's buy the least know one!

strebler4• 11 years ago

You may not be their target demographic, but Polyvore is certainly far from that. At 20M uniques per month, 2.4M new sets per month, $22M raised, 150 employees, highest AOV of all social media sites (ahead of Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter), Polyvore is literally the highest converting social platform of them all. They're a pillar of the fashion community.

smegel• 11 years ago

I remember commenting several months ago that the only time you ever hear about Yahoo is when they buy someone out.

Nice to see nothing has changed.

rebelidealist• 11 years ago

Yahoo Livetext app looks interesting.

http://www.producthunt.com/tech/yahoo-livetext

loceng2• 11 years ago

Smart acquisition by Yahoo!

roymurdock• 11 years ago

Who is Yahoo trying to target with all of these acquisitions? The only person I know who interfaces with the yahoo brand is my mom, because she doesn't know how to change her homepage.

I don't use tumblr so I'm not sure if they've found a way to get those users flowing to yahoo, but it seems like they would be completely contradictory demographics anyways. Same deal with with polyvore.

Any opinions?

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

Lots of opinions, but I'd start by inverting your question. Clearly Yahoo! gets a lot of traffic, and there are literally billions of people on the net, and unless you are an extreme extrovert the number of people you "know" is probably less than a couple hundred. Conversely if everyone you knew thought Yahoo! was the stupidest thing on the planet, statistically that would be representative of less than .1% of the available population. Which is why, starting from that position in terms of understanding something, will often lead you astray.

Wikipedia, citing Alexa's numbers, put Yahoo! at the #5 most popular web sites. Way higher than places like Reddit or Stack Overflow (sites which correlate strongly with hn readership). So that tells us that a lot of people (including people who can change their home page) voluntarily visit Yahoo! on a regular basis.

So clearly Yahoo! knows something about the people who are visiting their site that you and I don't. And I'm guessing they decided a lot of them liked Polyvore too and so adding that into the mix is a good thing. That said, I continue to find Yahoo! strategy hard to figure out, especially with respect to what kind of site they think they are.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites

sakopov3• 11 years ago

Yahoo! simply boggles my mind. I have no idea what they do well as a tech company anymore or why they're still around. Their homepage spams with news about Kardashians and other celebrities along with horribly written articles by Yahoo! journalists. Every once in a great while you'll read a great but rare REPOST from AP, NPR and other major news sources. Otherwise, they're squeezing every drop of any kind of mediocre news about a cat getting stuck on a tree with a 10 minute video description performed by some Yahoo! bubblehead.

They've shutdown any interesting projects like pipes, maps, search or any other area of innovation. Anything that's still around is just rotting on the outskirts of internet. When was the last time anyone heard of YUI? The Yahoo! email experience is quite terrible and buggy with frequent service outages. They're purchasing these random startups and generally show lack of any direction. It just seems like their execs get in the room together and go "What the fuck are we gonna do today, boys? Let's buy a fashion startup! Do we need it? No, but who gives a shit. Our users sure don't." And I genuinely think that most users don't. They're just stuck on Yahoo! because they don't know how to change their default homepage.

I don't know... I'm just glad they haven't killed Flickr yet and I have a place to follow some great photographers.

loceng2• 11 years ago

If you think of them as a global media company then Yahoo! is much easier to understand.

hayksaakian• 11 years ago

Yahoo wins by appealing to the mass market, lowest common denominator.

Do you honestly expect the same quality of journalism from Yahoo as the new york times etc.?

guycook• 11 years ago

They gave us* another season of Community, so that was cool.

*Although what they gave me specifically was "Geo Restriction - Sorry! The content provider has not given us the rights to play this video in your location." It's the thought that counts I guess

anotherangrydev2• 11 years ago

I really wish I had enough karma to downvote this opinion. It just reeks of ignorance and short-sightedness.

Polyvore is far from a "fashion startup". It has a very substantial user base and their whole proposal allows for very natural (and kinda cool) monetization strategies. Also, we don't know how much Yahoo paid for it, it could've been a real bargain; apparently around 60M, kind of cheap if you consider they've been pulling profit from years now.

You want examples of real companies that seem to be adrift? Try looking at Twitter. Or Google (although they have some real good products that keep the ship floating).

sakopov3• 11 years ago

I can see that with Twitter, but Google? How is Google adrift?

zeeshanm• 11 years ago

Yahoo! mostly attracts Mid-Western housewives. They know their users pretty well. I read somewhere Facebook's ~30% of users are mostly of these Yahoo! types. And these users are probably more likely to stick around. Hey, the internet is for everyone! :)

rhizome• 11 years ago

The Yahoo! email experience is quite terrible and buggy with frequent service outages.

Part of the reason they're still around is because people like you still use them for email.

sakopov3• 11 years ago

I have an almost 16-year-old email account with Yahoo that I started forwarding mail from a couple of years ago. I'd love to close it but it's hard to get rid of something that's been around for that long.

fowkswe• 11 years ago

But for how much?

interesting_att• 11 years ago

I may be the only person on HN who is bullish on Marissa Mayer's strategy.

Basically purchase aspiring start-ups that hit some troubled time scaling (Polyvore seemed to be running into some monetization issues). By putting the digital properties into Yahoo's network, the acquired company get lots of free traffic + better monetization (Yahoo already has a great brand sales department + the data Yahoo might have on people could make more engaging ad programmes).

suhail• 11 years ago

I think this is a bit flawed: it assumes the products were great but simply lacked a distribution strategy. In many cases, it's more likely the products were just ok and still lacked a distribution strategy - causing a sale.

My bet is Marissa is trying to build more driven, savvy, smarter leadership by buying it and promising influence.

heimatau• 11 years ago

I'm with you on her bullish strategy.

They've finally launched a mobile app. Looks nice, if it gains traction, then the new Yahoo! has arrived.

Yahoo! is copying Facebook, not 100% but in the way of humility. Mayer's Yahoo is finally pivoting to mobile and to social because that's the 'new homepage'. Look at all the social media addicts, hoping for likes and comments. Yahoo! has seemed to have learned the error of pride, they are now trying the meritorious way. I think it will pay off.

(I view FB's strategy as Mobile first. ~70% of their revenue is now mobile. Which is 4x what Yahoo! currently makes.)

morgante• 11 years ago

This seems like a great deal for Yahoo.

Yahoo Acquires Polyvore

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