Seeking To Boost Content, Yahoo Acquires Snip.it

Yahoo has acquired Snip.it, a social content curation site that reminds many of Pinterest.

AllThingsD reported earlier today that the purchase was in the works — with a reported price tag in the mid-teen millions of dollars — and Yahoo has confirmed it this afternoon via a statement from Mike Kerns, Vice President of Product:

“The Snip.it team created an innovative technology that lets people share content in a social and fun way. We’re excited to welcome them to Yahoo!, where they will help us build experiences that bring people with shared interests together. 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.”

Snip.it has already shut down its service (while also giving users a way to download the content they added to the site) and replaced its home page with a message that reads, in part:

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!. The Yahoo! team is passionate about inspiring and entertaining the world’s daily habits, and certainly sharing news and information is something we all do every day. The vision and energy at the company is contagious, and we’re so excited to be part of all that is to come.

Content appears to be one of the primary strategies that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is using as she tries to “redefine one of the Internet’s most beloved companies” — that’s how she described her responsibilities during Yahoo’s last earnings call. On that call, she also referred to content sites such as Flickr, Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Groups as “core” Yahoo products.