Online Media M&A Update 3: Yahoo! Acquires Bix

Privately held online contest site Bix is the latest in Yahoo!'s acquisition spree - Yahoo! has acquired Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming.org and Jumpcut over the past eighteen months and MyBlogLog, Kenet Works, and Bix in the past 24 hours. The Bix deal is expected to close in March, but terms were not disclosed.

Carly Mayberry at The Hollywood Reporter also notes:
Yahoo! will retain Bix's 16 employees, while Bix founder Mike Speiser will become VP community at Yahoo! in its Communities, Communications and Front Doors group, where he will drive such products as Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Photos and Bix.

Bix has a slightly different spin on the social networking, user generated content craze. They host and enbale user created contests (which reminded me of Am I Hot or Not?) on a range of topics - karoke, video, photos, whatever. Here's a singing faceoff to whet your appetite.

Yahoo!Video vs. Google Video/YouTube Bix contest anyone?

Fund It, but will they come?

In conjunction with Sunday's San Jose Mercury News article, detailing Q3 06 Bay Area Venture Investment reporter Constance Loizos highlights equity investment in the online media space across North America.

Her angle is that the future of online media will resemble today's cable TV programming - ad supported and slicker production value. VCs want a return on their investment, especially after the recent online media M&A activity, and advertisers want to capitalize on the traffic of the social media networking sites like YouTube and MySpace.

Investment is flowing into start-up broadband channel services including Denver based ManiaTV, San Francisco based Revision3, and LA based RipeTV, each of which is producing web-original serial shows. Many of these are taking a page from print mags Maxim and Stuff by targeting 18-24 year old males and others are creating more informative web-only programming Revision3's In Digital:



Also highlighted by Loizos, Boston based Brightcove ($21.5M in funding) and Maven Networks ($30M in funding) are competing to power and distribute monetized media for content libraries such as NBC's National Broadband Channel (NBBC), CBS's College Sports Television Network (CSTN), and Warner Music.

THR predicts more private equity investment in the online media space over the next two quarters along with ongoing consolidation as the Old Media networks broaden their own online channels to compete for the fragmented but growing, online video audience.