Yahoo Picks Up Social Browser Rockmelt in Year-long Trend of Acquisitions - The UpStream

Yahoo Picks Up Social Browser Rockmelt in Year-long Trend of Acquisitions

posted Sunday Aug 4, 2013 by Nicholas DiMeo

Yahoo Picks Up Social Browser Rockmelt in Year-long Trend of Acquisitions

It's a brand new week here in Cyberland, which means it's time for another company to be acquired by Yahoo. In what seems to be the ongoing trend as of late, Yahoo has been snatching up startups left and right, all while revamping their own projects, closing non-profitable ones and spending billions on established brands. Last week, it was Admovate and this week, it's Rockmelt, the startup social browser.

On their blog, Rockmelt posted:

We're excited to tell you that Rockmelt has been acquired by Yahoo!. Yahoo! and Rockmelt share a common goal: To help people discover the best content from around the web. In our short four and a half years at Rockmelt, we've learned a lot about how you like to browse the web, discover content, and share the great stuff you've found. You've been right by our sides as we've celebrated successes, endured failures, and invented new ways of doing things. You've taught us a ton. And we plan to put everything we've learned to work at Yahoo!.... Your kept items will be exported as bookmarks and the feeds you follow as an OPML file. The Rockmelt apps and web product will be shutdown on August 31, 2013.

Founded in 2009, the company was able to gain almost $40 million in investment funds from different companies around the country. The shutdown of Rockmelt's app and products are to be expected, as Yahoo has been doing that with nearly every other company they've brought into their portfolio over the past year.

It should also be pointed out that this wasn't Yahoo's only pick-up this week, either. The web giant purchased Lexity, an e-commerce business, but the terms of that deal were not disclosed. For Rockmelt, AllThingsD is reporting that Yahoo almost doubled the social browser's investment money, with a check in the ballpark of $60-$70 million.

Will Yahoo keep up this trend of buying up groups that will hopefully boost their relevancy moving forward? Or will they eventually run out of companies to buy and/or cash to spend?

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