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Comment by strebler | Hacker News Reader

You may not be their target demographic, but Polyvore is certainly far from that. At 20M uniques per month, 2.4M new sets per month, $22M raised, 150 employees, highest AOV of all social media sites (ahead of Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter), Polyvore is literally the highest converting social platform of them all. They're a pillar of the fashion community.

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And I heard they were profitable, which when combined with all those #s, makes the low acquisition price really fishy. $60m for all that is way too cheap. Maybe Polyvore's CEO panic sold or had terrible bankers, but with $22M raised you would expect a professional board to have control and to be much more experienced. Growth could have totally stalled, or worse, started to reverse. I'd bet there's more to this story.

I didn't see the $60M number, it's certainly cheaper than I'd expect. I agree, I wish I knew the full story!

http://recode.net/2015/08/03/yahoo-paid-around-200-million-f...

Apparently it was 200M, not 60M. I have to stick to my original hypothesis, Polyvore is more valuable than some realize.

They may be important, but the argument against them isn't just not understanding their market.

If they were a strongly profitable, or even high revenue-generating, company then the announcement wouldn't be about strengthening Yahoo's digital portfolio or expanding their reach in mobile, social, and native. It would be yelling about the cash flow potential.

Site visits, money raised, and number of employees are not business metrics.

My point was related to them being incorrectly labeled as "least known" - site visits is directly relevant to that. As for the impetus behind the acquisition, I'm not one to speculate.

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