June 6, 2005
Shopzilla to be acquired for $525M
According to an article in Reuters today,
the E. W. Scripps Co., which owns newspapers, broadcast and cable TV networks, said it will pay $525 million in cash for 100 percent of Shopzilla, one of the leading pure-play shopping search engines (formerly known as Bizrate).
The article offers this rationale for the deal:
The Internet is shaking up the once-staid and lucrative business of classified advertising. Newspaper publishers that once enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the classified market now face increasing competition from Web sites like eBay.
This comes just days after Ebay agreed to buy Shopping.com. I think the eBay/Shopping.com deal seems to be more strategic, because eBay was already in the business of helping users comparison shop for products. But I do agree that the decline of the newspaper classified advertising business is driving major activity by all the papers. Following on these lines, I expect there will be a string of acquisitions of vertical search engines, particularly those related to classifieds, within the next year. The next one I would predict: Oodle, a classified search engine that aggregates across many sources of classified ads and provides a nice faceted search interface.
Posted by barney on June 6, 2005 at 3:56 pm | No Comments
June 2, 2005
eBay acquires Shopping.com for $620M
eBay announced today that they will acquire comparison shopping site Shopping.com for $620M in cash. This is obviously a major development in the online shopping space. It’s Ebay’s biggest purchase since Paypal.
continue reading the eBay acquires Shopping.com for $620M
Posted by barney on June 2, 2005 at 3:38 pm | 1 Comment
May 29, 2005
Yahoo’s David Filo and Jerry Yang at D3
Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg interviewed Yahoo!’s David Filo and Jerry Yang in the last
session 2005 All Things Digital Conference.
David and Jerry reflected on:
- The early history of Yahoo!
- The alternating and intertwined importance of algorithmic search and editorial directories in the past and the future of
Yahoo! - Yahoo!’s history and current developments in media and entertainment,
including the Yahoo’s subscription music service - Communications and Mobile services
- The feature wars with Google and other competitors, including the
increasing focus on personalization and community
For me, the most interesting part of the whole discussion concerned the
acknowledgement that search is king today, but that tags and personalization
are ushering in a new importance for editorial browsing:
David: People start with words, but in the results the directory is
there. People have become very comfortable with typing in words.Jerry: Philosophically, as people want to navigate they may choose to search,
choose to browse. As we see more heightened awareness around tags, it brings
us closer to a filtered or browse scenario. I think we’re just starting to
see the back and forth scenarios. Yahoo has that capability. We can do it
in a very integrated way. Eventually those two finding metaphors will
coexist.
The rest of this blog entry contains my notes.
continue reading the Yahoo’s David Filo and Jerry Yang at D3
Posted by barney on May 29, 2005 at 3:39 am | No Comments