Yahoo! Acquires Online Contest Site, Bix.com

Yahoo! Inc has acquired a community-based website called Bix.com, where users arrange contests and rate each others' photos and videos online. The acquisition is an attempt to compete against social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook, by integrating Bix with Yahoo! Groups, social network, Yahoo! 360 and photo sharing site, Flickr. However, the companies have not disclosed financial terms of the deal.

Mike Speiser, president & CEO of Bix published a letter, addressed to all its users, saying, "This transaction will bring to the Bix community the Web's largest audience—Yahoo! reaches 500 million users per month on Yahoo!-branded services worldwide (1 out of every 2 internet users). This is huge folks! It means that every performer on Bix will be performing on essentially the world's largest stage with a potential audience in the hundreds of millions."

Bix is currently focused on talent—based online contests, with categories such as photography, Karaoke, comedy, dance and writing among others. The prizes for winners of the contests range from a few minutes of Internet fame to cash or merchandise, sponsored by advertisers.

Despite being launched in January this year, Bix has enjoyed massive popularity, considering the growing fascination with online videos. Moreover, the site also has video and audio recording tools that work with computers connected to a low-cost webcam device, camera phone or digital video camera, making it a shorter route for everyone's 15 seconds of fame.

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