While trying to re-invent the wheel is an uphill struggle, riding on the wave of what is already popular and successful, makes the job much easier.
Yahoo, as we know, bought, amongst other things, Flickr, del.icio.us and MyBlogLog. eBay announced its acquisition of StumbleUpon (for $75 million), CBS Corporation is buying the popular music social network Last.fm. (for $280 million. The largest UK Web 2.0 acquisition ever.) MySpace recently purchased Photobucket (cheap, at $250 million). News Corp also formally announced it would buy widget creator Flektor (estimated to cost between $10 and $20 million). The other day, we mentioned that Google bought Feedburner (for $100 million). They are also buying photo-sharing site Panoramio and already own YouTube - on top of everything else online not already listed. 
You might be asking yourself, does anybody have any money left?
Or, is this a repeat of the mad “investing” (in fresh air, seemingly) in the internet boom, before it all went pear-shaped?
Yahoo, Google and the like obviously considered these good investments and, it’s fairly easy to see why when you consider what the alternative costs of developing an idea themselves would be for those large corporations, not even knowing if an idea is going to catch on with the internet community.
And, the sellers certainly look like they did OK too.
What these have in common, of course, is that they are all sites where the users provide the content in some way. This has been discussed before as a good model and I think it will continue to be for plenty of time yet. Just requires putting the ideas together with the know how and making it popular.
No, obviously that’s not easy, or I would have done it, wouldn’t I?
The point I think to keep in mind is that what these corporations are doing really is to buy the ability to reach the user bases of these sites. And that asset - the users - is what you need to build a “saleable” venture.
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Sponzurz
