Yahoo Looking to Sell HotJobs, Buy Xoopit
With their Q2 results out—and better than expected—Yahoo seems to think they’re now in a prime position to review their holdings. In their portfolio, and on the chopping block: HotJobs and Yahoo Small Business. But Yahoo may also be looking to invest, most likely in Xoopit.
According to Reuters, Yahoo may be looking to divest itself of HotJobs, a job search website, as well as the division over Hot Jobs, Yahoo Small Business. YSB covers Yahoo! Domains, Yahoo! Web Hosting, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, Yahoo! Business Email, and Yahoo! Store, which could net the company a big bonus. Yahoo has been looking to sell for 2-3 months in an effort to focus on its core business.
Meanwhile, Yahoo is rumored to be in the final stages of acquiring Xoopit for around $20M:
sources said it was a done deal to buy the San Francisco-based social email start-up that finds photos, video, links and other files in email so that users can surface and then share them on many sites. It also has other products that essentially enliven email. . . .
According to sources, Yahoo was first impressed with its innovative plug-in that works with Gmail from Google (GOOG), and has been looking at the company for a while, previously offering about $10 million for it.
Xoopit also makes a similar photo-sharing application for Yahoo Mail, which it launched late last year.
As we said in May, Yahoo really wants to get in on social networking. Yahoo announced its social/mail push back in January 2008, but we haven’t seen a lot of movement on that front. The full acquisition of Xoopit might constitute the first step in that direction—but it doesn’t look like focusing on Yahoo’s core business of search. (On the other hand, their free webmail offering is an important part of the business, too.)
What do you think? Will Yahoo really sell HotJobs and YSB and/or buy Xoopit? Would either/both be a good idea?







