Bix.com Purchased By Yahoo
Yahoo has purchased Bix.com an online site devoted to allowing users to rate and share photos, video, singing, writing, dance, comedy and beauty. Users compete in contests for prizes ranging from cash to other corporate incentives.
The site creates some of the contests while users create others. Anyone is allowed to create a contest from a corporation to a user. Bix, which was started in January of this year by Mike Speiser, CEO, employs 16 people. They launched in August and are based in Palo Alto. Speiser was the previous founder of Epinions, which was later, purchased by Shopping.com in 2003 and later by Ebay in 2005.
In a message written by Speiser about the Yahoo purchase of Bix he wrote, "This transaction will bring to the Bix community the Web's largest audience -- Yahoo! reaches ~500 million users per month on Yahoo!-branded services worldwide (1 out of every 2 internet users). This is huge folks! It means that every performer on Bix will be performing on essentially the world's largest stage with a potential audience in the hundreds of millions."
Yahoo plans to allow Bix to continue to operate independently while integrating them with other services. Spieser will be VP of Community for Yahoo responsible for Yahoo! Groups, 360, and Photos.
Details of the purchase price have not been released. Since the launch of Bix in August the site has enjoyed more than one million users. Yahoo has plans to allow users to run Bix contests on other sites like MySpace and Flicker along with other Yahoo sites.
Yahoo's purchase of Bix seems like a solid move. The site is young but has shown to be popular with users. The potential for growth could be strong.
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