Yahoo sells social bookmarking site Delicious to Avos

San Francisco, Apr 30: Yahoo sold its social bookmarking website, Delicious, to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

Delicious will become part of Avos, a new Internet company started by Hurley and Chen. The selling of Delicious is a part of Yahoo's plan to cease under-performing sites. Yahoo decided to axe or sell some of its under-performing services to generate more profit.

Delicious is one of the most survived social bookmarking services with more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs. Yahoo acquired Delicious (del.icio.us) in 2005 just two years after its launch in a deal, that was pegged between $15 million and $30 million.

Earlier, we had reported Yahoo's 'sunset' plans on popular services like Yahoo Buzz, Traffic APIs, AltaVisat and Delicious.

"We're excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level. We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the Web," Avos' chief executive officer, Hurley said.

"As we have said, part of our product strategy involves shifting our investment with off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation. We believe this is the right move for the service, our users and our shareholders and look forward to watching the Delicious technology develop," Yahoo said in an e-mailed statement about the deal.

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