Yahoo! To Acquire Summly
Today, we're excited to share that we're acquiring Summly, a mobile product company founded with a vision to simplify the way we get information, making it faster, easier and more concise. — At the age of 15, Nick D'Aloisio created the Summly app at his home in London.
Context & Ripple Effects
Summly had spent 2012 positioning concise news summaries as a mobile reading product, described in its push to make news summaries appealing to mobile readers. Yahoo enters the deal with 11 percent of its U.S. visitors mobile-only in February, making mobile information delivery a product priority rather than a peripheral channel.
The purchase follows Yahoo's completed acquisition of personalized-recommendation startup Jybe five days earlier. Together, the moves concentrate small mobile-product teams and their technology inside Yahoo rather than leaving them as independent apps.
First-order effects
- Yahoo gains Summly's team and technology, including founder Nick D'Aloisio, in a cash acquisition reported at $30 million.
- Summly's standalone app will close, requiring its users to find news summaries through another product rather than the existing app.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo can pair Summly's concise-reading approach with the recommendation capabilities it acquired through Jybe, strengthening its mobile product toolkit.
- Independent mobile news-reading apps lose one visible peer but may gain users displaced by Summly's shutdown.
Third-order effects
- If Yahoo continues to absorb focused mobile apps rather than operate them independently, small consumer startups will increasingly be valued for product talent and features that can be folded into larger distribution platforms.
The trend: Consumer internet companies are using acquisitions to assemble mobile discovery, recommendation, and concise-content features inside their core products.