Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) announced, on Tuesday, its plans to purchase scrapbooking and aggregation site Snip.it. The latest acquisition is a Pinterest-like service, which allows the new users to clip, organize and share articles. Snip.it was established in 2011 by Ramy Adeeb, previously an investor at Khosla Ventures. Yahoo is believed to be paying in the “mid teens” of millions of dollars to purchase Snip.it, says a report by AllThingsD.
Snip.it released a blog post today saying, “We are thrilled at the opportunity to bring Snip.it’s vision to a larger scale at Yahoo!. While we can’t share the specifics of what we’ll be building, we are excited about the opportunity to take social news to new, exciting heights at Yahoo!.”
A statement posted on Snip.it’s website read, the company would “no longer support snipping,” and the existing users (7,000 users last year) will be able to download and export the “snips” they had created using its service till February 21. The company appreciated the support of its user base and honored its top members in a hall of fame. However, the company did not reveal the project it would be working on at Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), apart from being related to social news.
“The Snip.it team created an innovative technology that lets people share content in a social and fun way,” Mike Kerns, Yahoo’s vice president of product said in an email statement. “Reading and sharing content is a core daily habit for most of the world, and we can’t wait to work with the Snip.it team to make that experience even more entertaining for our users.”
In an interview in 2012, Adeeb, an Egyptian native, said the idea for the site popped during the recent Egyptian revolution, when the need for sharing articles on Middle East politics was not met by Twitter as most of the interactions via Twitter was limited only to tech in Silicon Valley.
Snip.it rivals like Clipix have already pounced on the opportunity, asking users to import their “snips” into “clips”.
