The world tech industry has witnessed some major transformations in the first 3 months of 2024. One such major event has been the acquisition of the AI-driven news platform, Artifact by Yahoo. On Tuesday, April 2, Yahoo announced the same. The American web service provider also stated that it would include Artifact’s technology across its news and other sites. This deal is symbolic of the struggles faced by media startups to thrive in the industry and generate revenue in an era, where the major portion of advertising revenue is grabbed by big leading Tech giants such as Google and Meta.
Artifact had earlier mentioned through one of its blog posts in January that it would wind down its operations due to the limited market opportunities available for the app. Meanwhile, Yahoo has viewed this acquisition as a valuable opportunity to strengthen opportunities across its different verticals and serve as a customized content provider to the audience. The companies haven’t yet shared the financial details about the acquisition. Yahoo has stated that it would only acquire the tech of Artifact and not its team; and that the co-founders of Artifact who also co-founded Instagram would be working as “special advisors” for Yahoo but won’t be a part of the company, during the acquisition transition. Artifact also holds some minority stake in Taboola, which is a content management platform.
Artifact was started by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in the initial months of 2023. The duo is the same which also founded together Instagram back in 2010. But the latter was taken by Meta(previously known as Facebook) which is headed by Mark Zuckerberg, in 2012. The duo reportedly left Facebook in 2018, the reason being some feuds between the Meta head and Instagram founders. There also emerged visionary differences between the two parties for Instagram.
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About Artifact
A social news aggregator app that took the help of recommender systems to suggest articles, Artifact was often hailed as the “TikTok for text” and often competed with Twitter. The app basically generated personalized articles based on topics, news sources, and authors that readers might find their interest in. Other than reading articles, one could also like them, post comments, and listen to the audio version of these writeups which could be read by AI-generated voices. Despite some of its unique offerings, Artifact couldn’t last for long and in January 2024, Kevin Systrom publicly announced to wind up the platform’s operations, stating that “the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way.”
About Yahoo
Yahoo! Was started in January 1994 and has completed 30 years of its inception. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It is a web services provider and the array of services that it offers is web portal, a search engine by the name of Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, amongst others. It has its advertising platform too, by the name of Yahoo! Native. Cofounders Jerry Yang and David Filo started Yahoo in 1994 and the platform was one of the pioneers of the internet era in the 1990s.
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