Announced just a few hours ago, Bix, the online contests site I covered back in July, has been acquired by Yahoo! for an undisclosed sum — reportedly to be less than $15 million. The 16-person Silicon Valley company will continue to run as an individual product (Flickr and Del.icio.us site, as “a Yahoo! company”), but CEO Mike Speiser will also be taking the title of ‘VP of Community’ at Yahoo!, managing some of their other products. Here’s the official message from the Bix CEO.
Since I last wrote about Bix upon their initial launch, they’ve managed to grow quite massively within the time-frame of just a few months. With over 10 categories, their largest contest to date has offered up to $50,000 in prize. They raised $6.8 million in initial VC funding and it seems to have paid off quite hugely.
With some of the acquisitions Yahoo! has made over the past few months, it’s clear that they’re trying to build communities and focusing on getting the people. What they’re not doing is integrating their acquisitions into their own products or even with each other, the complete opposite of Google’s strategy (with the exception of YouTube).
Bix is really about entertainment, as opposed to say Flickr and Del.icio.us which are about usefulness and make people’s lives easy. I’m guessing with this acquisition that they’ve tried to equal the playing fields a bit, as well as get a chunk of the web and CEO Mike Speiser’s managerial talents.
[tags]Yahoo!, Bix, Contests, Acquisitions[/tags]
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