After the $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo is bidding for Hulu.
Yahoo had officially submitted their proposal to buy Hulu, a website subsidized by News Corp and Walt Disney Co that offers ad service for streaming TV shows and movies, and will compete with the growing list of bidders for the service.
Yahoo will bid against Directv, Time Warner Cable, KKR, Guggenheim Digital, The Chernin Group, and William Morris Endeavor. However, the web giant kept their bidding amount confidential.
Reuters wrote on their website that one of the bidders-- Chernin, a research and acquisition firm-- offered $500 million plus a debt-pay off for Hulu. The source said that it is unlikely for Hulu to consider it since the company's value is at least $1 billion.
Time Warner bids for partnership or equity investment wherein they will be willing to combine their offer with another company's offer to acquire Hulu.
Yahoo is not responding when asked about the details of their offer. The web giant has been into acquisition to enhance its mobile and online products to the internet users. It is still a relevant search engine but would like to revive the top spot it lost from Google and Facebook.
So why are companies excited about buying Hulu? Let's look at the online stats of the video service provided by Alexa, which provides reliable web traffic data, so that we will all understand the hype.
Hulu stands at the 270th place in the global rank and 56th in the U.S. Almost 1.7 billion minutes per month are used by the site to play videos while ads airtime is at 454 million minutes. Millions of ad-time is valuable for companies as it will effectively promote the brand and generate revenue.
