Forbes to Buy Social Bookmarking Site ClipMarks?

ClipmarksRumors are circulating today that ClipMarks, the social bookmarking site that could and in a smaller scale ‘did,’ may have been bought by Forbes, the news giant. VentureBeat was one of the first to report it earlier today. No rumored price has been revealed, but Michael Arrington’s price instincts — which I to agree on — say it’s likely to be no more than something in the lower millions.

ClipMarks, which is based in New York, enables you to clip things from the web — text, photos, videos, etc. — make selections, and save them to your ClipMarks folders. In a similar way to how Del.icio.us works, ClipMarks focuses more intensely on browser integration and solving the problem for online researchers and students rather than focus on getting everybody to replace their browsers’ Bookmarks.

For social bookmarking sites, it’s been all hype and no big money. Del.icio.us got bought by Yahoo! for the lower millions a couple years ago, as did Reddit by Conde Nast and ClipMarks is very likely to follow. A similarity worth noting between the acquirers is the fact that they’re all content companies — someone like Microsoft or Google, which base their innovation on technology, seem less interested in diving into the market.

If this deal follows, that leaves us to wonder what’s happening with the last usual suspect: Digg. Is Google it? Or perhaps the ad deal with Microsoft may go further? Or is the last usual suspect going to be joined by the last usual suspect, AOL? Let’s find out. :)

3 Responses to “Forbes to Buy Social Bookmarking Site ClipMarks?”

  1. Wayne Smallman — 08/08/07

    I do like Clipmarks, and I don’t get to post on there as much as I would like.

    I have different social bookmarking services for different types of stuff I happen upon.

    I tend to use Clipmarks for science, physics and astronomy stuff, while I use del.icio.us for tech’ and web stuff.

    They’re also a very different crowd on Clipmarks, too. A much more gentle, relaxed and enlightened feel to content and comments alike…


  2. Josh Miller — 08/08/07

    It’s interesting to see how the services out there should handle all different kinds of people, but certain types gravitate to certain types.

    I wonder if these “social bookmarking” sites called themselves “cool directory” if they wouldn’t just lose all their traffic.


  3. apple texan — 15/08/07

    ClipMarks has a variety of things in their blogs, i like that.


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