Science Inc. buys Delicious from YouTube co-founders' Avos Systems for an undisclosed sum
YouTube Founders to Sell Delicious, a Social Bookmarking Site — The social bookmarking service Delicious has changed hands twice over the last decade, while failing to attract a mainstream audience.
Context & Ripple Effects
Delicious has been passed between owners almost as often as it has been redesigned. The Guardian was already probing its struggles back in December 2005, and after Yahoo's stewardship the YouTube co-founders' Avos Systems took it on, promising a fresh start with Chad Hurley at the helm in its 2011 relaunch. That reset landed poorly — Pulp Tech's post-mortem called the AVOS era 'a complete failure' — and by January 2014 the service had turned to ad experiments and a rate-limited, authenticated API in search of revenue.
First-order effects
- Science Inc. takes control of a property with an intact brand and user base but no mainstream traction, buying at an undisclosed price that — given two ownership changes and a decade without breakout growth — points to a distressed valuation rather than a competitive bidding war.
- Avos Systems, the YouTube co-founders' vehicle, exits the bookmarking business entirely after roughly two and a half years in which the promised revival did not materialize.
Second-order effects
- The sale removes the last well-known backer experiment in standalone social bookmarking, leaving the category's smaller independent services to absorb orphaned Delicious users rather than compete against a resurgent incumbent.
- Science Inc.'s playbook — acquiring stalled consumer web brands cheaply and attempting to reposition them — becomes a visible template for studios shopping for other neglected early-social properties.
Third-order effects
- The pattern here — a pioneering Web 2.0 utility changing hands twice while native save/share features inside large platforms absorbed its use case — suggests standalone bookmarking survives only as a niche product recycled for its domain, data, and residual traffic rather than as a growth business.
- For founder-led rescue acquisitions generally, the AVOS-to-Science sequence reinforces the discipline that celebrity provenance does not substitute for distribution: buyers will increasingly price such assets on traffic and monetization mechanics, not on the names attached to them.
The trend: Pioneering Web 2.0 utilities like Delicious are cycling through successive owners at falling valuations as their core use cases get absorbed into large platforms, turning once-category-defining brands into repositioning assets for acquisition studios.