ON YAHOO! BUYING FACEBOOK AND OTHER CHALLENGES

FULL PLATE

Looks like Yahoo! remains focused aggressively on the opportunities and challenges of building businesses around social networking. 

The Wall Street Journal has a detailed (and somewhat gossipy) story on the company coming close to agreeing on a $1billion acquisition of Facebook, the popular college-centric social networking site, continuing the frenzy of hyper-media hype around current internet darlings like YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.

In addition, the company is in discussion with Al Gore's Current TV venture, to build it's user-generated video business, as this New York Times article explains.

These reports are faint echoes of Yahoo! acquisitions of Geocities and Broadcast.com in the 1990s.

(Separately, the New York Post has a story on YouTube looking for "at least" $1.5 billion for a possible sale, something that Yahoo! as well as other internet incumbents have to keep in mind, YouTube's legal issues and all).

All this despite the hopefully short-term revenue downturn the company announced in it's advertising business a few days ago, which dented it's stock a bit.

Not to mention the continuing delay in deploying Panama, the new advertising platform that would enable the company to better compete with Google.  It's expected to be rolled out early next year, after being pushed back to later this year, a few months ago.  There's a good user discussion around these recent issues around this post by Fred Wilson.  Here's a comment by a Joe Agliozzo:

"Yahoo has huge problems that will not be soon corrected.

1. our customers spend $30M a year on Google and only a fraction of that on Yahoo because Y!'s management systems are so messed up;

2. internal Yahoo product development and management on the search engine ad side is in a shambles, and they can't find their way. You can bet that Panama will be delayed again. We have had many meetings with Y! tech people over the last 18 months to try to make our product work for our customers on Y! and have gotten nowhere, meanwhile at G, everything works like a charm. So the money flows to G and away from Y.

3. IF Y! could fix their problems they could take back a lot of $$'s because all my customers would love to diversify away from G a bit and spend more on Y!"

The point of all these ad hoc data points is that Yahoo! certainly has a lot on it's plate, both short-term and long-term.

It's good that they remain proactive about the future, while focusing on the problems in the present. 

But it's important to make sure that the needed due diligence around the long-term initiatives doesn't get short-changed by the short-term imperatives.

Comments

[Yaser Anwar]

MP,

You're right Yahoo does have a lot on its plate at the moment. Yahoo's recent fall in stock price has hurt its ability to finance a mammoth acquisition as Facebook.

Viacom, Yahoo & MSFT are now looking to quickly catch up to NWS & GOOG, so I'm worried that they may overpay for Facebook and it may not be a great ROI. My other worry is; the once coveted facebook among college students (like myself) will soon become diluted and out of sync, just like www.hi5.com

That being said, the future does look bright. With a 150 mil deal with MSFT, Facebook has proved that it can monetize the site. The recent announcement of opening up to the general public will only propel its audience.

[Yaser Anwar]

In an interview with FT, Time Warner CEO, Dick Parsons said that companies planning to acquire Facebook or YouTube will have to take a “big leap of faith” because of valuations close to $1 billion.

Quite similar to what I said the other day. There was a nice image on Paul Kedrosky's blog, about how Venture Investing in 06 was greater than 01-05 deals combined.

Could this be a bubble? Only time will tell but the characteristics of this boom are quite similar to a bubble.