Excellent analysis of the negotiation and valuation of the Yahoo acquisition.

Is the board angling for a small bump in the price - or are they just seeking a shareholder lawsuit?

Quoted: Yahoo's board determined that the $31 per share offer "massively undervalues" Yahoo

For $240M, Microsoft gets:

- 1.6% ownership stake
- 50% of international (non-US) ad revenues (for how long?)

This is on top of MS's previous deal to receive banner ad revenue in the US through 2011.

Facebook has 50 Million active members each month. I think it reasonable to expect that that number will go to 75M in the US - but there is a limited amount of growth in the next 5 years (generational changes have to occur to break the 100M barrier).

I don't know what Facebook's international penetration is - one would think the potential would be there for 100M outside the US as well.

So, with 200M active users, each visiting the site multiple times per week, it's not outrageous to assume a 4 B visits per month business, generating 20B monthly page views.

At $2 CPM that would generate revenues of $40M per month (480M per year) [I would expect FB gets well BELOW $2 CPM; FB users are busy using FaceBook - not looking at and clicking ads]

Rather than purchasing equity - MS may just be purchasing inventory in this deal (like their previous one with FB). If FB can penetrate international markets similarly to how they've operated in the US, MS could get a $100M annual revenue stream from this deal.

Quoted: The investment ends two months of jockeying among Microsoft, Google and Yahoo for the right to invest in and forge close ties with the fast-growing social networking Web site.

Good for them! Our friends at Jellyfish are becoming part of Microsoft (but staying in WI).

I must say I found their shopping site quite fun.

Quoted: Microsoft has acquired Madison, Wisconsin based discount shopping service Jellyfish.com. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but the deal was sealed ...

eBay wisely offered a smaller payout if Skype did not hit targets. Is Skype really doing that poorly, thought. Maybe not worth $530 million - but who is doing better in this market?

Quoted: Thus, eBay will only pay $530 million of the potential $1.7 billion earnout (some small consolation).

List of Google Acquisitions. Google seems to be generally good about integrating acquired companies. But some "failures" come to mind:

Measure Map - purchased 18 months ago and their product is STILL not available to new users.

JotSpot - acquired almost a year ago - just has a BETA signup page on their home page.

Did google just buy these for the people and then kill the products?

Parakey - the integrated Web/Desktop OS just purchased by FaceBook.

Google is spending twice what it did on YouTube to acquire (this time) a real-revenue generating business. They are paying 10x revenues for DoubleClick.

This purchase augments Google current online ad auction business (AdSense). I believe DoubleClick's ads are generally higher priced (CPM) than those offered in Google's inventory. Will that remain the same when DoubleClick rolls out it's auction-based ad placement?

Quoted: Acquiring DoubleClick expands Google’s business far beyond algorithm-driven ad auctions into a relationship-based business with Web publishers and advertisers. Google has been expanding its AdSense network into video and display ads online and is selling ads to a limited degree on television, newspapers and radio.d advertisers. Google has been expanding its AdSense ...