
Yahoo Acquires Polyvore - praneshp
http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/31/yahoo-acquires-polyvore/
======
interesting_att
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
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.

------
smegel
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
Yahoo Livetext app looks interesting.

[http://www.producthunt.com/tech/yahoo-
livetext](http://www.producthunt.com/tech/yahoo-livetext)

------
roymurdock
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
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites)

------
loceng
Smart acquisition by Yahoo!

------
fowkswe
But for _how much_?

------
morgante
This seems like a great deal for Yahoo.

------
nso95
Yahoo is making me sad, they just can't seem to make progress.

~~~
gcb0
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!

~~~
strebler
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.

~~~
nugget
And I heard they were profitable, which when combined with all those #s, makes
the low acquisition price really fishy. $60m for all that is way too cheap.
Maybe Polyvore's CEO panic sold or had terrible bankers, but with $22M raised
you would expect a professional board to have control and to be much more
experienced. Growth could have totally stalled, or worse, started to reverse.
I'd bet there's more to this story.

~~~
strebler
[http://recode.net/2015/08/03/yahoo-paid-
around-200-million-f...](http://recode.net/2015/08/03/yahoo-paid-
around-200-million-for-polyvore-a-search-engine-for-fashion/)

Apparently it was 200M, not 60M. I have to stick to my original hypothesis,
Polyvore is more valuable than some realize.

------
sakopov
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.

~~~
anotherangrydev
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).

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

~~~
anotherangrydev
I see Google a little adrift in many of their new ventures, from Google+ to
date. But, however, they maintain a pretty solid strategy in the fundamental
products that generate most of it revenue, which is pretty much the ad market.

I think that the urge to diversify their money, coupled with, "well, we have a
lot of money" is causing Google to invest in many things that eventually turn
to dead-ends. That makes Google seem a little adrift, from my perspective, but
nothing that would put their business at risk.

