Top 10 tech mergers

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Posted on 9 Aug 2010 at 16:07

Over the years, there have been many company mergers in the technology industry. Almost every month, we hear about another technology company being acquired and with IPOs happening less frequently, being bought by a bigger company seems like the only way to grow quickly. Not all mergers make it into the news, but we’ve put together a list of the biggest mergers to happen recently.

Google/YouTube

Online video sharing site YouTube was something of a phenomenon and quickly became one of the most-visited websites on the internet after launching in 2005. In 2006, the company was facing some serious hurdles as it announced that users were viewing more than 100 million video views and adding 65,000 videos each day.

It was costing the site’s owners tens of thousands of pounds to run the site each month, but there was no way of making money out of its audience’s thirst for home video. The site was also plagued by piracy lawsuits from film and television studios after its users started uploading copyrighted content.

Late in 2006, Google announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion – effectively saving the video sharing site from becoming a victim of its own success. While the merger hasn’t been an unqualified success, Google’s technology boffins have solved YouTube’s legal concerns with the ContentID platform and even struck deals with major copyright holders, but the company is still figuring out how to turn it into a significant revenue-spinner.

AOL/Time Warner

With more dial-up internet users than anyone else, AOL was the darling of the internet before the dot-com bubble burst. Its merger with media conglomerate Time Warner was a classic example of the lunacies that went on before the things turned sour and was one of the biggest in corporate history at the time. Announced on January 10th 2000, the deal cost AOL an earth-shattering $164 billion and it took 12 months to get through the FTC’s antitrust approval process.

It was meant to lead to a new internet behemoth designed to cope with the demands of media-consuming users in an internet age. However, the merger could only be described as a match made in hell – one that former AOL Time Warner boss Steve Case described as the biggest mistake of his career.

In 2002, the newly combined company reported a loss of $99 billion – the largest ever reported by a company at the time – which highlighted just how much of a mistake it was to make.