Maybe.

But:

1- Is the traction convertible to any Yahoo properties?

2- Are the 1 million "downloads" legitimate interested users? Do any of them still use the app?

3- Did the "traction" come from paying firms to get them to the top of app store(s)?

I assume Yahoo knows more about this stuff than I do, and I'm not a Yahoo shareholder. Still, I didn't get the impression that the article was just complaining about rich teenagers.

According to Alexa, yahoo is the 4th most visited website in the world. They have innumerable ways to generate traffic. "Traction" implies a company that is not being visited at all trying to get a jump start, and is just not accurate.

Not all traction is created equal. I'm not sure how simply Yahoo could convert its users, who tend to be more conservative, to mobile.

Technical parity is a bad way to price a company, i.e. the value of Summly cannot be approximated by what it would take to replicate the technology in-house.

What happened to the good ole days when a huge corporation would just implement the app on their own and cut out the need for an aquisition?

For $30 million, even an order of magnitude less, I think a lot of us could put together a team good enough to implement the Summly app. That's what's being questioned by the blog post.

I have no faith whatsoever that Yahoo will productize or promote anything they create and there's no real evidence that anyone else should think that either.

But at only 1 million downloads, they've paid $30 per download. If they were mostly interested in the traction, that would seem quite excessive to me.

I can tell you as a founder of a startup with about a million users, the rule of thumb right now is 10 million is the new 1 million. No VC cares.