Yahoo buys sportssite Rivals.com

Yahoo has just bought rivals.com - a popular sportssite in the US. The site will operate as a seperate entity within the Yahoo sports division and is a strengthening of it's media division.

Takeover Season

I know - this is what I get if I don't blog for a long time....

SO MANY TAKEOVERS TO REPORT!!!

I've been positively surprised by the number of takeovers/acquisitions over the last months and will try to give a overview of some of them and their potential consequences:

Display advertising - Market upheaval

Wow - this must be the most explosive one. Google buys Doubleclick for 3.1 billion dollars , Yahoo buys Rightmedia, WPP buys 24/7 Real media and the in a move that I can only explain as "drive by fear of losing out" MSN buys Aquantive for a whopping 6 billion dollars!!!
That's a total of 10.4 billion dollars spend on display ad firms. It seems there is quite a consensus that display ads will pay off big time in the (near) future. Maybe seeing the success of systems like adwords and Yahoo's panama the display ad market will now move into "intelligent" bannering and get systems that are both smart in their targeting (micro-niche targeting, behavioral targeting etc) as well as that they will have smart payment systems (auction/bid system, perhaps even combined with pay for performance modules).

The only player left standing alone is Valueclick, the ad company that also owns affiliate system Commission Junction, tracking software provider (my favorite) Mediaplex and some other platforms. Who is out there to buy this one - eBay? AOL? IAC? Another "offline player"?


Web 2.0 - acquisitions continue

The most active sphere of little acuisitions is the web 2.0 sphere. Here we've also seen some interesting acquisitions

eBay has bought Stumbleupon. The acquisition rumors came already early and I'm surprised my former company wasn't able to keep the information inside - something they are usually good at. eBay also bought a turkish auction site.

Google has bought feedburner. Good acquisition I think. I also found this site with an overview of Google's "acquisition scorecard". Google has been also active in the geo-space -e.g. with the acquisition of Panoramio

And one I also wanted to mention; CBS has bought Last.fm

Twitter & Jaiku

I've been following it a bit over the last ~4,5 months and have VERY rarely really used it: Microblogging.

Until two weeks ago at Mobile Monday in the "Rode Hoed" where I saw a great presentation by Jyri Engeström from Jaiku. The event had a backchannel via Jaiku and the whole thing got me interested again in the microblogging thing. My impression so far though is that it is a great nice tool to follow people and events, but takes quite some time again - as if the overload in emails and IM isn't enough yet. I will give it a try again for the coming weeks and see if I get addicted as well or if I stay with my current conviction; nice, but I will hardly join this thing....