Internet portal Yahoo! has announced plans to buy eGroups, a
privately owned company, in a deal worth $430m in order to raise
its community profile. eGroups is an e-mail group communication
service that aims to make sharing interests, collaborating, and
exchanging ideas among many people via email easy and
efficient.29 Jun 2000
Some commentators believe that this transaction signals a developing trend of large internet companies buying out smaller ones as the value of dot.coms falls.
Yahoo! plans to incorporate eGroups, which has 17 million members and over 800,000 active e-mail groups, into its existing internet applications which include Yahoo!Mail, Yahoo!Messenger and Yahoo!Clubs.
Goeff Ralston, general manager of Yahoo!’s communications group, believes that “E-mail groups is an application which is really core to the way people communicate on the internet”. In a statement, Yahoo! said, “The acquisition combines the web's largest on-line community with a leading provider of e-mail group communications. The combination of these two companies supports Yahoo!'s goal to be the only place anyone has to go to find and get connected to anything or anyone”.