It should be noted that Geocities was a public company at the time with a market cap of $2.3b. But also that it generated only $7.5m in revenue the prior quarter.
Got to love those bubbles.
Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
31–40 of 122 posts
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#32While we're on the topic of Yahoo acquisitions in 1999, here's another: http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#33i was a part of the team that bought GeoCities at Yahoo, and i think it wasn't as dumb of a deal as it looks on paper, because a) YHOO stock was so high at the time that the $3.8B wasn't actually all that dilutive, and b) buying GeoCities ensured Yahoo was the #1 destination online, and thus we could command a disproportionate share of ad revenue. If you wanna look at a really silly deal that Yahoo did, how about the Broadcast.com deal? Billions for a bunch of servers...
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#34Oh, those heads days! That a "website" could be bought for $3bn+ prodded a lot of young employees to say "WTF, let me quite my job and make a website.com". I should know, because I was one of them.
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#35This is very relevant now because rumors are that Yahoo is about to buy Tumblr for over a billion dollars. If they only took care of Geocities they would not have to buy it all over again in Tumblr form.
How is this relevant?
Different era. Different CEO. Different corporate culture. Different demography. Different way people use the internet. Vastly different size of users.
Tumblr could very well die on its own without anyone's help. Last I heard it was not making any profit yet, and took huge amount of money from investors. In the long term, investors don't care how many users you have if you are not making much money.
I personally want tech industry to get away from 2-3 companies dominating. I want a new challenger, that could be yahoo (we don't know yet), but I am willing to give them the benefit of doubt; and a chance to prove themselves under new leadership.
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#36That Aol, Yahoo, and Geocities were the top sites on the internet back then makes me wonder if we're now screwed out of the future innovation that might happen because our big 2, Google and Facebook, may be too big to fail (or at least fall), at least for a while.
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#37" In a separate announcement, GeoCities posted a net loss of $8.4 million, or 27 cents a share, for the fourth quarter ended, compared with losses of $3 million, or 14 cents a share in the year-ago period. Revenue for the three month period rose 341 percent to $7.5 million. For the year, the company lost $19.8 million, or 71 cents per share, compared to a net loss of $8.9 million, or 44 cents a share, in 1997. "
and bought for $3.57 billion... With 19 million unique visitors per month, or 228 million per year, you'd need to generate revenue of $15 from each of those _visitors_ on average to just return the investment... (not accounting for the losses)
The good ol' economic sense of the 90's... That said, hindsight is always so 20:20.
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#38Oh, those heads days! That a "website" could be bought for $3bn+ prodded a lot of young employees to say "WTF, let me quite my job and make a website.com". I should know, because I was one of them.
did you get rich? :)
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#39" In a separate announcement, GeoCities posted a net loss of $8.4 million, or 27 cents a share, for the fourth quarter ended, compared with losses of $3 million, or 14 cents a share in the year-ago period. Revenue for the three month period rose 341 percent to $7.5 million. For the year, the company lost $19.8 million, or 71 cents per share, compared to a net loss of $8.9 million, or 44 cents a share, in 1997. " and…
The good ol' economic sense of the 90's...
Seems SV still has the same economic sense.
Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
#40This is very relevant now because rumors are that Yahoo is about to buy Tumblr for over a billion dollars. If they only took care of Geocities they would not have to buy it all over again in Tumblr form.
For the history books, Yahoo's M&A has been more trend-defining than anybody else.
Geocities in 1999 -- spawned the dot com rush
Flickr (2005) -- the official web 2.0 start date!
Tumblr (2013) -- ???