Bix.com Acquired by Yahoo!

Yet another site has just been acquired in the web 2.0 age as reported by TechCrunch today:

Online karaoke and contest site Bix has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo! Bix CEO Mike Speiser will continue running Bix but will also take on responsibility for product management for Yahoo! Groups, 360, and Photos under the title VP of Community.

Speiser was previously the founder of Epinions. Epinions was acquired by Shopping.com (then DealTime.com) in 2003, which in turn was acquired by Ebay in 2005. Epinions had an estimated valuation of $30 million at the time of acquisition. The terms of the Bix acquisition weren’t disclosed but it was probably for much less than Epinions; Yahoo! was rumored to have paid $15 million for online video editing company Jumpcut last month. Bix probably got a little less than that but Yahoo! got a seasoned social media man to put in charge of a number of product management at the company’s most social products.

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SEO is Still the Top Traffic Source

Today we saw in several blogs a story about About.com, the old network of guided how-to sites purchased in March 2005 by the New York Times Company for $410 Million, where it says that About.com gets 80% of its total traffic from search engines. It seems the SEO works very well for many top web properties as long as they are trusted Google sites...

About.com is made up of 500 "Guides", people who are experts on a certain topic. In a way About.com was the precursor to topic-focused blogs. Only the guides are more renowned for writing how-to articles, rather than the analysis and commentary of the best blogs. About.com these days also has a lot of reviews and product comparisons, similar to a site like CNET.

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