5 Ways To Build A Company That Yahoo Will Acquire

In 2003, Yahoo acquired Overture Services Inc. for a whopping $1.6 billion.

Overture was credited as a pioneer in charging for prime ad space in Internet search results.

Yahoo takes online advertising very seriously. In addition to the big Overture acquisition, Yahoo sued Facebook in 2012 over patent infringement, including one relating to advertising.

Yahoo will do anything it can to improve and protect its ad business. Any startup that could assist with that may prove to be a spectacular takeover target.

Yahoo may not offer the leading search engine, but it has been trying to build the dominant player for years.

Thus far, Yahoo has acquired Net Controls (whose technology was incorporated into Yahoo search), HotJobs (a career search site that was ultimately sold off), Overture (search engine marketing) and SearchFox (whose technology was also integrated into Yahoo).

This sends a clear message that Yahoo is very interested in businesses that can take search to the next level.

Yahoo loves a cool app.

Last summer the company acquired Qwiki, an app that automatically merges photos, videos and music into mobile movies.

Before that Yahoo brought Stamped (a share recommendation app) into the family.

Yahoo also purchased Lexity, which made apps for small businesses, among others.

The company loves apps so much that Mashable was inspired to create a list of the top 20 Yahoo has acquired since Marissa Mayer became CEO.

If you can develop a cool app (or at least make Yahoo believe that you did), you just might get a call from the company.

When Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion, the company quickly gained access to the network's 300 million users.

The company purchased Broadcast.com (which delivered 520,000 unique users per day), Flickr (which had 87 million users in March 2013) and a number of others.

Yahoo also purchased GeoCities, but the company may want consumers to forget about that one.

This trend is unlikely to end anytime soon. Last year Yahoo unsuccessfully attempted to acquire Dailymotion, one of the largest video sites in the world with more than 100 million unique monthly visitors.

Thus, if you want your business to be acquired by Yahoo, you should fight to acquire as many users as possible first.

Startups should be doing that anyway, right?

Ptch. Evntlive. Tumblr. Flickr. Qwiki.

These are just some of the startups that Yahoo has acquired, and they all have one thing in common: their names are comprised of misspelled words.

Is this a coincidence? Maybe. But this unusual trend cannot be denied.

If nothing else, it definitely appears that Yahoo has a thing for companies with weird or misspelled names.

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