Yahoo Is Shutting Down IntoNow, Nearly Three Years After Acquisition
IntoNow — the second-screen app that Yahoo bought in the spring of 2011, just 12 weeks after its launch — is being shut down by its parent company. As of last week, IntoNow was taken off the Apple App Store and Google Play …
Context & Ripple Effects
Yahoo paid a reported $20–30 million in April 2011 for IntoNow just twelve weeks after launch, one of the fastest flips of the second-screen boom and an early bet that TV-check-in technology could anchor its video ambitions. The company has since kept buying into video — picking up QuikIO for its video team in December 2013 — while folding acquired features into flagship products, as it did with Summly summaries inside its redesigned iOS app in April 2013.
The kill notice lands four days after Yahoo's Cloud Party acquisition, which arrived with the same immediate shutdown attached, making this the second buy-and-bury of January 2014 alone. It comes against a weak backdrop: Q4 2013 revenue down 6% and display advertising down 6%, giving Marissa Mayer's team little room to carry standalone apps that aren't pulling their weight.
First-order effects
- IntoNow users lose the service outright, with the app pulled from Apple's App Store and Google Play as of last week.
- Yahoo retires a three-year-old product whose team and audio-recognition know-how had already been folded into its broader video push, freeing resources for the QuikIO-staffed video effort.
Second-order effects
- Founders fielding Yahoo offers now see the terms plainly — two January 2014 deals (Cloud Party, then IntoNow) closed with shutdowns attached — so future negotiations price these as talent hires, not product bets.
- Every retired standalone app narrows Yahoo's mobile footprint back toward its single flagship iOS app, raising the bar for what remaining acquired properties must show to survive the same review.
Third-order effects
- If buy-to-kill stays the default, early-stage consumer M&A drifts toward per-engineer pricing and standalone apps lose acquisition exits as a funding rationale, pushing investors toward fewer, larger mobile bets.
- For Yahoo specifically, the pattern completes a strategic turn from running a constellation of acquired brands to concentrating traffic and ad inventory — its declining display business — on one consolidated app experience.
The trend: The 2011-era spree of quick-flip consumer app acquisitions is maturing into a consolidation phase in which Yahoo buys teams, not products, and retires the brands it bought.