“Yahoo is expanding its news, blogging and social networking horizons through the acquisition of BuzzTracker and its new Facebook rival Yahoo Mash.”
New York — Internet Search Company Yahoo Inc. announced earlier this week that it has acquired ‘BuzzTracker’, a news aggregation site, for an undisclosed sum, and named the site’s founder, Alan Warms, as general manager and vice president of Yahoo News.
Sunnyvale-based Yahoo acquired the Web Company’s technology and staff from Chicago-based Participate Media, BuzzTracker said Friday on its blog. The company also provides its aggregation software to other businesses.
“BuzzTracker does just what the name asserts — it tracks 110,000 content sources (traditional media and blogs) to take the pulse of what’s happening in various topic areas on the Net.”
In a phone interview Friday, senior vice president of Yahoo News and information, Scott Moore, said BuzzTracker’s technology will augment Yahoo News.
“Say there is a plane crash in Argentina — some remote thing that all of a sudden happens — we can use BuzzTracker to create an index of everything around that topic that is happening, almost instantly,” Moore said.
“Buzztracker tries to show you how interconnected the world is: big events in one area ripple to other areas across the globe. Connections between cities thousands of miles apart become apparent at a glance,” the Buzztracker site says.
BuzzTracker ranks more than 1,000 topics on more than 90,000 blogs, displaying the most-read and discussed stories of the day, according to its Web site. The technology will add to Yahoo’s news pages and help it fend off competition from Google and sites such as Digg.com.
“The decision to sell the business and move to Yahoo! was relatively simple,” Warms said on the company blog. “As anyone playing in the online space understands, online media is all about scale. The ability to garner real CPMs, the ability to sell ads directly, the ability to provide innovative solutions to advertisers, all depends on having tens of millions of unique visitors.”
“Before launching BuzzTracker, Warms also founded RealClearPolitics.com.”
“Yahoo! News is the leader in online news — the number one player according to both ComScore and HitWise, and I am extremely excited to come aboard as General Manager and have the opportunity to drive value from News, extend Yahoo!’s leadership position and contribute to their commitment to being more open by bringing the best content from across the web,” Warms wrote on his blog.
Yahoo’s news page attracted 35.2 million users in June, the most among similar sites in the United States, according to comScore. Google was sixth with 9.28 million, the Reston, Va.-based research firm said.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Although early speculation has the purchase price of the news aggregation site falling somewhere between: $5-$7 million.
The sale closed on Tuesday, he said, and under the deal Yahoo acquired substantially all the assets of Chicago-based Participate Media, of which BuzzTracker is the sole product. Warms is the founder and CEO of Participate.
“A spike in traffic and a position as VP and General Manager of Yahoo News are just Warms’s perks from the deal.”
On Yahoo’s end it appears that the $5-$7 million price was right for the search giant, as Kara Swisher of All Things D reports from her sources that Yahoo had looked at other better-known competitors in the space. But those trendier and more popular startups apparently had too lofty valuations.
“Warms and Yahoo spokeswoman Bahareh Ramin declined to confirm the price.”
Details of how BuzzTracker will be integrated with Yahoo are still being hammered out, Warms said, but he is not expecting any “drastic changes” to Yahoo News.
BuzzTracker is the Sunnyvale, Calif., company’s second acquisition in two weeks. On Sept. 4, Yahoo said it will pay $300 million for direct marketing network BlueLithium.
“Yahoo is further taking on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace with its own version called Yahoo Mash.”
Yahoo shares added $1.01, or 4.3 percent, to finish Friday’s session at $24.73 and remains unchanged in after-hours trading.