Yahoo over the past few years had been striving hard to regain their foothold, until their new CEO arrived and they started their new investing spree. In order to reinforce and fortify their portfolio they have started getting rid of unnecessary services and have been bagging in new ones and purchasing new start ups. For now their prime goal is ‘Snapchat’, and if the company manages to stick to their plans they would require investing millions into this mobile messenger start-up. As approximated, the investment will not go into vain and will rather drastically increase the value of this company. If they carry on with their plan in future, they would be pegged at the worth of 10 billion according to the present day market value.
Initially, when the idea of this messaging app was introduced maximum were against it. Yahoo’s messenger application allowed people to snap a picture and share it with your friends and acquaintances. However, the plus point here is that the file cannot be saved and only after a few seconds or a minute the file is automatically deleted. People have assumed that this new application will lead to a lot of chaos and increase in the circulation of obscene pictures and porn. Although, this assumption did not prove to be completely true but partially this was the case. The app also turned to be a huge hit amongst youngsters who support the idea of video sharing and like being crazy sometimes.
Snapchat did become a hit, and this was clearly evident when some of the e-commerce retailers like Alibaba and global tech giants like Facebook offered yahoo a takeover for 3 billion dollars and yahoo cleverly refused the proposals. Yahoo is planning increase their stakes by investing another 20 million dollars into Snapchat.
Inspite of the criticism that yahoo received they never looked back. Snapchat has been capable of bagging the appreciation of thousands of its users and the proof is the new ‘picture of sisters’, with two young girls sporting bikinis were shared and soon became popular over both the messenger site and Google. However, after the pictures became viral and the girls faced criticism and harassing comments, they sued the CEO of Yahoo for sharing their photographs without proper consent. The girls had clarified that the pics were taken and shared for some college project work and was never meant to be a material to be shared over the World Wide Web.
Regardless, of whatever hurdles Yahoo has faced they have managed to gain momentum by introducing interesting features. These latest additions have also allowed them to continue their competition with Viber and WeChat. Yahoo’s CEO in 2012 also purchased MessageMe which allows users to ping their friends over the Smartphone using stickers and emoticons. However, soon later in November MessageMe was shut down. The idea of Snapchat was originally created by a group of university students in Stanford in 2001 and since then it has been accepted and equally appreciated especially by the teenagers.