Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Yahoo Poised to Acquire Content Curation Site Snip.it (Updated)

Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo is in the process of acquiring a startup to help its efforts to become a destination for content.

Yahoo is expected to announce this week that it has acquired Snip.it, a Pinterest-like site for article curation, according to sources familiar with the deal.

Update, Tuesday at 3:50 pm PT: Yahoo and Snip.it confirmed the deal. Snip.it is giving users a month to download their data.

Snip.it was founded by Ramy Adeeb, who was formerly a principal at Khosla Ventures, and has funding from Khosla, True Ventures, Charles River Ventures and SV Angel.

Yahoo is paying “mid teens” of millions of dollars for the company, according to a source.

It’s unclear what will now happen with Snip.it, which helps users share and discuss news articles and videos, both on their own and in groups.

As I wrote when the site first launched in Oct. 2011, “Adeeb is an Egyptian living in San Francisco who built his company’s bookmarking tool after experiencing his home country’s revolution from afar earlier this year, when all his friends were interested in hearing his perspective on what was happening in Egypt.”

Kara Swisher yesterday described Yahoo’s new approach to content:

While one might argue that Google is already the Google of content, the plan is to make Yahoo more relevant by tailoring it to the individual and make the site a “trusted destination to get them to where they want to go and keep going back.”

Thus, the thinking goes, while Google is the place people come to search for links, Yahoo then becomes the place users come to find content. That means more partnership deals from third-party sources, with an additional social component layer and synced across a number of devices and platforms, especially video.

“Google will find links for content,” said another source. “Yahoo will put the content right there.”

If it all sounds a bit like a turbocharged Twitter, you’re right. It’s especially important since the old big-traffic deals that Yahoo could strike based on their portal power have become supplanted by marketers looking for mobile, social and other solutions.

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First the NSA came for, well, jeez pretty much everybody’s data at this point, and I said nothing because wait how does this joke work

— Parker Higgins via Twitter