As I was going through posts related to Flickr's acquisition, I came across this piece from the New York Times: Ask Jeeves Inc. to Be Bought for $1.9 Billion (via Steve Rubel).
IACI would pay $1.2B in cash (a third of its cash reserves, according to this), and the rest in stock. This offer would represent a 30+% premium on ASKJ's last closing price of $24.24.
In my book, this does not count as Act 4 of Social Media consolidation, but the takeout of the 4th largest Internet search engine (with a 2% market share, according to Search Engine Watch) is certainly worth noting.
There were some questions as to how far ASKJ could go in its recent comeback, and IACI has had its problems in executing on building an Internet empire based on a number of acquisitions. We'll have to see how this one goes. Given the combined online advertising budgets of all IACI properties, I would suspect that Diller's strategists have seen a strong rationale to integrate a search engine into the mix.
What a (Sun)day!
Assuming he got a portion of Bloglines' consideration in ASKJ stock, Mark Fletcher might be up for a nice pop. Good for him.
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