YouTube Founders Save Delicious from Doom

Good news: The social bookmarking site Delicious has been saved from Yahoo's wrecking ball. YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have acquired the site for an undisclosed sum.

Delicious was founded in 2003 by Joshua Schachter, an entrepreneur I got to know as a contributor to his early group blog Memepool. Delicious is a free service to organize web bookmarks and share them with others. This was briefly a phenomenon before Facebook and Twitter devoured all other forms of link sharing.

New owners Hurley and Chen have formed the AVOS startup to run Delicious and have designs on some kind of search business:

Going back to their roots, Hurley and Chen located Delicious in downtown San Mateo, California, blocks away from where they started YouTube. They're aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web.

When Yahoo announced it was either shutting down or selling the site in December, it appeared likely that it was a goner. As a user for years, I figured at some point I'd need to migrate my data someplace else. Looks like that's unnecessary.

Yahoo bought Delicious in 2005, reportedly for $15 to $20 million. Geek System reports today that Yahoo's asking price for Delicious was around $1 to $2 million. The numbers work pretty well with some advice I offered on Twitter back in December: If you sell your site to Yahoo, set aside 10% of the money so you can buy it back after Yahoo drives it into the toilet.

Business · Yahoo · Bookmarks · 2011/04/27 · 0 COMMENTS · Link