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Re:Walmart Joins Talks to Buy TikTok by Apocryphon on Thursday August 27, 2020 @01:09PM (#24295843)
I'm betting that Verizon is going to be next in line. They've been acquiring content companies for quite a while now- the remnants of AOL and Yahoo. They seem to be a good choice as far as strange buyers go.
Re:Walmart Joins Talks to Buy TikTok by evanelias on Thursday August 27, 2020 @02:19PM (#24296769)
Highly doubt it. Literally all of the Verizon execs who were deeply involved in those acquisitions are long gone. The integration of Yahoo was pretty horrendous in execution, even by large corp M&A standards, which is a low bar.
Re:Walmart Joins Talks to Buy TikTok by skinnymuch on Thursday August 27, 2020 @11:50PM (#24301193)
Verizon sold Tumblr for nothing. They’ve written down the majority of AOL and Yahoo. That attempt of theirs is a failure and Verizon for now has moved on.

Other companies have had similar fates with trying to make media content mini-empires.

Almost all of these bad decision are with hindsight. Though some may be more obvious - CBS paid too much for Last.FM and CNET’s network of sites that at one point extended pretty far. - Fox paid too much for MySpace and IGN Whose smaller network of sites extended pretty far too before. Fox sold both off for fractions of their purchase costs. - NYTimes sold off About.com and didn’t do too much with their other small attempts.

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- IAC is the most successful, but they spin off most of their best stuff and so the actual main companies market valuation isn’t too high. Though the not too long ago spun off Match has a higher market cap.

Amazon is fairly successful though how much that has to do with Amazon doing well as well can be debated. They did some ruthless stuff like Diapers.com. IMDB, Box Office Mojo, Goodreads, Twitch, and one or two other purchases have worked out well enough

Comcast’s very small web media sites have fared well enough too until covid hit. Their Fandango umbrella of sites including Rotten tomatoes was doing well.

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It’s hard to break into the web in a big way. Especially with being content centric or with niche social media sites.