Bubble 2.0 Watch: Big Bucks for Newroo

It seems Fox Interactive has acquired Newroo, a Web 2.0 application for “less than $10 million.” That’s million, not thousand. I’d tell you more about Newroo, except, well, the thing is it hasn’t even launched yet.

While $0 is technically “less than $10 million,” unless someone is being intentionally deceptive, you have to assume the number is reasonably close to $10 million. At a minimum, in the several million dollar range.

Mike Arrington says it’s a “small acquisition” for Fox.

One Commenter describes Newroo as “Memeorandum for the masses,” which is similar to the way Mike described it earlier. So users can pull content from a lot of other sites into a custom content aggregation page. That’s pretty neat, but a lot of other sites do this right now- My Yahoo, Google and Tailrank to name a few.

Maybe Newroo does it better, but $10 million dollars better?

The revenue model is, of course, ad-based, with the presentation of Amazon affiliate links for items related to the news that displays on the user’s page. The plan is to “eventually” share this revenue with the users who create the pages.

When big companies start buying unreleased technology with no meaningful revenue sources for multiple millions of dollars and referring to it as a small purchase, you can be sure the bubble is rising.

As long as these mega-companies are spending their own money, no worries. Condition red will occur when we start hearing words like IPO and spin-off.

Stay tuned.

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About Kent

Reader, writer, arithmeticer. Proprietor of Newsome.Org, a tech, music and life blog.

  • http://www.reallifenews.com/ DavidM

    I’ve been getting flashbacks of the telecoms bubble for a while and this is another interesting example.$10m is pocket change for the big corps, so there is little harm for them in snapping up orgs like Newroo just to make sure they are in the game.We’ll get into a full-blown bubble if other corps panic that they will miss out, buying up anything and everything.