Yahoo purchases content pinning site Snip.it
Yahoo has purchased content pinning and curation site Snip.it, the company confirmed on its website Tuesday following a report at AllThingsD. The reported acquisition price is somewhere between $10 and $20 million, which fits with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s stated goal of making more small acquisitions.
Snip.it was founded in late 2011 by Ramy Adeeb, a former partner at Khosla Ventures. Somewhat like a Pinterest for text, it let users “snip,” save and share articles or excerpts from around the web in a graphical interface. As a result of the acquisition, Snip.it “will no longer support snipping” and told users to download their data by February 21. “e are thrilled at the opportunity to bring Snip.it’s vision to a larger scale at Yahoo. While we can’t share the specifics of what we’ll be building, we are excited about the opportunity to take social news to new, exciting heights at Yahoo,” the company said.
Snip.it had also allowed users to share collections of articles and join groups around topics. As my colleague Katie Fehrenbacher wrote last year, Adeeb “created the site because he wanted to share content about the Arab Spring, but he didn’t want to take the time to write a full blog post or run a website.” Many of the groups on Snip.it are on fairly serious topics that people are passionate about, like foreign affairs and science and the environment — no handbag pictures here.
AllThingsD reported Monday that Yahoo’s goal is to become the “Google of content,” citing a source who said Yahoo should be “a destination where people go to find content regardless of where it originates from.” Snip.it obviously helps the company achieve that goal, and allows it to move away from creating its own content and then trying to promote it in a sea of competitors.
Disclosure: Snip.it is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.
More From paidContent.org
