Rumors suggest that Yahoo is possibly interested in buying Imgur, the online image hosting service.
Recently, Yahoo purchased Ptch and Evntlive, which are video streaming services and it seems that the company is heading for few more acquisitions.
Marissa Mayer, the current CEO of Yahoo who joined the company in 2012, has already acquired many startups. Yahoo has also acquired Tumblr, the micro-blogging and social media website in June this year for $1.1 billion. The key reason for Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr was the fact that the service has a deeply engaged and youthful audience, which uses the service on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Imgur has a similar rapport with the audience when compared to Tumblr, which makes the company attractive to Yahoo.
A Business Insider report cites sources familiar with the matter and says that Yahoo has already started discussions with Imgur regarding the acquisition. Imgur was founded by Alan Schaaf in 2009 in Athens, Ohio, and offers image hosting to millions of users globally.
"I got fed up with all the other image hosts out there so I made my own. It doesn't force you to compress your images, and it has neat things like crop, resize, rotate, and compression from 10-100. It's my gift to you. Let's not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here ;)" said Schaaf on a Reddit community.
Imgur is now based in San Francisco and currently has just 10 employees working for the company. Even though Imgur is not a big business, it generates decent revenue via ads and memberships. The company is also testing its new product "sponsored images," which will bring in extra revenue for the company. Additionally, Imgur also sells image hosting capacity to other companies and interestingly, Yahoo is one of its clients.
The popularity of Imgur, and the fact that it is already generating revenue, will be a stumbling block when it comes to pricing negotiations and Yahoo may not be able to purchase the company at a low price.
Yahoo has not yet commented if it has interest in Imgur.
The internet giant's shares closed up 3.47 percent at $40.22 on the NASDAQ on Tuesday.
