The founders of YouTube on Wednesday bought popular bookmarking site Delicious from Yahoo, promising to keep it up and running and maintained.
Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who sold their video hosting site to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, said they planned to integrate Delicious with their new Internet company AVOS.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“We're excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” Hurley, CEO of AVOS told AFP in a statement. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the Web.”
Hurley and Chen said they would seek to use Delicious to “develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload.”
“We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” Chen added.
Delicious will most likely evolve into something slightly different as AVOS pursues its mission.
“We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the Web,” said Hurley.
Delicious, created in 2003, provides a forum for sharing Web bookmarks to URLs. Yahoo will hold onto the site until July, when it will be transitioned over to AVOS.
“We believe this is the right move for the service, our users and our shareholders and look forward to watching the Delicious technology develop,” said Yahoo, which bought the bookmarking site in 2005.
YouTube’s sale to Google made both Hurley and Chen wealthy. Hurley received 735,000 shares of Google stock worth an estimated $350 million when the deal closed in November 2006. Chen received 625,000 shares of Google worth about $300 million.
Yahoo decided to scrap Delicious as part of a cost-cutting strategy adopted by CEO Carol Bartz. That strategy helped boost Yahoo’s earnings, but revenue still remains shaky more than two years after Bartz was hired to turn the company around.
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