Mike has the scoop. Here’s Joshua’s take.
Congrats to Fred and to Joshua. Here’s Yahoo’s post on it.
Update: Sources peg the acquisition price at around $30-35 million….similar to the size of the Flickr deal. If this is the case, it’s pretty rich. I don’t recall the size of del.icio.us’s user base, but I doubt it’s 250,000, which was the reported user base of flickr when it was acquired. If it *is* that size, then wow, it’s grown much faster than I realized!
Second Update: OK, now I have *more* sources that say yes, the deal is similar to Flickr, but *that* deal was not really at 30-35 million, it was more like $17-19 million.
And – this is simply amazing to me – del.icio.us has 300,000 users. Holy sh*t.
I tend to not like to see smaller groups bought by bigger ones, as more and more places are controlled by a few corporations. But maybe this will be for the good — not sure at this point.
I too have mixed feelings. I have been enthusiastic about del.icio.us, giving them more links than usual and I am now excited that they may get a big boost from Yahoo.
On the other hand, I’m less enthusiatic about great things getting folded into the “big three” too quickly. Maybe it’s time for this.
It was a matter of time before someone gobbled them up.
What does this say for the value of Furl, Spurl or any of the other social bookmark sites?
Congrats on them being bought out. I highly doubt they could have made more money staying independent.
I think Del.icio.us has definitely gained enough users to have a network capable of generating interesting results for users. There is always something interesting on del.icio.us’ Popular page. Clearly, Yahoo – if they integrate the site well – should be able to take this to another level.
Does anyone use more than one social bookmarking site? How will a #2 get into the game? That may be as hard as unseating Ebay in the auction game.
I’m interested in the privacy considerations as far as using this info for ad targeting. All of a sudden Yahoo has a whole lot of data about me and my interests as a user that would be *extremely* valuable data when targeting ads – especially on their contextual Publisher Network. In fact, I might argue that my 500 delicious bookmarks as a dataset would be as valuable for ad targeting as the content on the page I’m actually viewing. Very interesting.
I’m not against it, I would prefer ads that are targeted to me – as long as I’m aware of it. just wondering if they’ll use my data in that way.
(And actually, I think I probably trust yahoo with that data more than Google)
I see this as a move to accelerate My Web 2.0 beta and enhance Delicious’ “Fraternal Twin” — Flickr.
Delicious’ growth metrics are quite compelling and there is really synergy with its other recent acquisitions. The question is, is it worth the $30-40 million? How much that per user? per tag? Expensive!
However, it is a great way to bootstrap its community, not to mention get a Firefox extension ;-).
It also prevents competitors from getting their hands on it.
I wrote a more detailed response on my response to the deal.
>>>Does anyone use more than one social bookmarking site?
I have been enthusiastically following as many as I can and have 28 of them linked at my home page (under Tag Engines) but of course the most interesting and useful will always be those used most and del.icio.us leads the pack (not counting flickr). digg and Shoutwire are exciting variants on this…
The whole concept will evolve more quickly with added traffic from Yahoo and now that I think more about it I think there will be a broadening of the topics, and that can only be better!
With much greater numbers the overlapping of tags will show new patterns.
The last numbers I saw on del.icio.us had over 300,000 members.