Oveture was not a bad acqusition
Don Dodge thinks Yahoo’s 2003 acquisition of Overture was 8th worst billion dollar acquisition of an Internet company. I would probably put it at the top of my best billion dollar Internet acquisitions list (if I did keep such a list). Yahoo got Overture at a low valuation (about 2x revenue) and gave Yahoo major revenue from the get-go and a lot of customer relationships. Even with Yahoo’s investment in Panama (arguably Yahoo! has invested too little in improving Overture’s search monetization, see the gap between Google and Yahoo in search monetization) that is a major, major asset that will/have generated economic profit that justifies the purchase price.